Browse

Born in Philadelphia in 1905, Catherine Littlefield first learns dancing from her mother, Caroline (called Mommie), who was an expert pianist, and from a local dancing master, C. Ellwood Carpenter. As a teenager, Catherine becomes a Ziegfeld dancer and takes lessons from Luigi Albertieri in New York. She returns home in 1925 to help Mommie teach at the Littlefield School (among her students is Zelda Fitzgerald) and stage dances for women’s musical clubs and opera companies. William Goldman hires Catherine to produce routines in commercial theaters throughout Philadelphia and becomes her boyfriend. Catherine, Mommie, and Catherine’s sister, Dorothie, travel to Paris so the sisters can study ballet with Lubov Egorova. They become friendly with George Balanchine in Paris and help him establish his first American school and company when he comes to the United States in 1933. Catherine marries wealthy Philadelphia attorney Philip Leidy and founds her Philadelphia Ballet Company in 1935. She choreographs—and her company presents—the first full-length, full-scale production of Sleeping Beauty in the United States as well as popular ballet Americana works such as Barn Dance and Terminal. Her company’s European tour in 1937 is the first ever by an American classical ballet troupe. Catherine loses some of her protégées to the newly formed Ballet Theatre and disbands her company after the United States enters World War II; she then choreographs Broadway musicals, Sonja Henie’s Hollywood Ice Revues, and Jimmy Durante’s NBC television show before dying in 1951 at age forty-six.

This volume contains interviews with twenty-six of the most prominent oboists from around the world. The chapters are in prose format and highlight different aspects of each musician’s career, focusing on musicianship and pedagogy in ways that are applicable to all musicians. The interviews contain topics such as creating musical interpretations and shaping phrases, the relationship of vocal to instrumental music, taking orchestral auditions, and being a good ensemble player/colleague. The subjects describe their pedagogy and their thoughts on breathing and support on wind instruments, developing finger technique, and creating a useful warm-up routine. The oboists discuss their ideals in reed making, articulation, and vibrato. They also share stories from their lives and careers. The oboists and English hornists profiled from North America are Pedro Diaz, Elaine Douvas, and Nathan Hughes (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra); John Ferrillo (Boston Symphony Orchestra); Carolyn Hove (Los Angeles Philharmonic); Richard Killmer (Eastman School); Nancy Ambrose King (University of Michigan); Frank Rosenwein and Robert Walters (Cleveland Orchestra); Humbert Lucarelli (soloist); Grover Schiltz (formerly Chicago Symphony); Eugene Izotov (San Francisco Symphony, originally from Russia); Allan Vogel (Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra retired); David Weiss (formerly Los Angeles Philharmonic); Randall Wolfgang (New York City Ballet and formerly Orpheus Chamber Orchestra); Alex Klein (Brazil, formerly Chicago Symphony and currently Calgary, Canada); and Sarah Jeffrey, Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The performers based in Europe are Neil Black, Nicholas Daniel, and Gordon Hunt (England); Maurice Bourgue and David Walter (France); Thomas Indermühle (Switzerland); László Hadady (Hungary and France); and Omar Zoboli (Italy). From Australia is Diana Doherty of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

This book brings a theorist and performers together to examine the interface of analysis and performance in music of the twentieth century. Nine case studies, of music by Ravel, Schoenberg, Bartók, Schnittke, Milhaud, Messiaen, Babbitt, Carter, and Morris, are co-authored with performers (or composers) of those works. The case studies revolve around musical structure, broadly defined to comprise relations among parts and whole created in the process of making music, whether by composers, performers, listeners, or analysts. Knowledge that is produced in the course of relating analysis and performance is conceived in three dimensions: wissen, können, and kennen. The collaborative process itself is viewed through three constructs that facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration: shared items, shared objectives (activity objects and epistemic objects), and shared agents. The book’s collaborations “thicken” the description of analysis and performance by illuminating key issues around (a) the implicit identity of a work: the role of embodiment, the affordances of a score, the cultural understanding of notation; (b) the use of metaphor in interpretation: here metaphors of memory, of poetry, and of ritual and drama; and (c) the relation of analysis and performance itself: its antagonisms, its fusion, and—rounding out the perspectives of theorist and performer with those of composer and listener—the role of structure in audience response. Along with these broader insights, each collaboration exemplifies processes of analysis and of performance, in grappling with and interpreting particular pieces. Video performances, demonstrations, and interviews; audio recordings; and photographs partner with the book’s written text.

At the dawn of the 1990s, as the United States celebrated its victory in the Cold War and sole superpower status by waging war on Iraq and proclaiming democratic capitalism as the best possible society, the 1990s underground punk renaissance transformed the punk scene into a site of radical opposition to American empire. Nazi skinheads were ejected from the punk scene; apathetic attitudes were challenged; women, Latino, and LGBTQ participants asserted their identities and perspectives within punk; the scene debated the virtues of maintaining DIY purity versus venturing into the musical mainstream; and punks participated in protest movements from animal rights to stopping the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal to shutting down the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting. Punk lyrics offered strident critiques of American empire, from its exploitation of the Third World to its warped social relations. Numerous subgenres of punk proliferated to deliver this critique, such as the blazing hardcore punk of bands like Los Crudos, propagandistic crust-punk/dis-core; grindcore and power violence with tempos over 800 BPM, and So-Cal punk with its combination of melody and hardcore. Musical analysis of each of these styles and the expressive efficacy of numerous bands reveals that punk is not merely simplistic three-chord rock music, but a genre that is constantly revolutionizing itself in which nuances of guitar riffs, vocal timbres, drum beats, and song structures are deeply meaningful to its audience, as corroborated by the robust discourse in punk zines.

Theological Stains traces the growth of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a riveting and provocative account, Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers grappling with biblical redemptive promises and diasporic patrimonies. Unveiling the network that bred territorial nationalism and Hebrew culture, Shelleg shows how this mechanism infiltrated composers’ work as much as it triggered less desirable responses from composers who sought to realize to the nonterritorial diasporic options Zionism has renounced. In the process, compositional aesthetics was stained by the state’s nationalization of the theological, by diasporism that refused redemption, and by Jewish musical traditions that permeated inaudibly into compositions written throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Accompanying this rich and dramatic story are equivalent developments in modern Hebrew literature and poetry alongside vast and previously unstudied archival sources. The book is also lavishly illuminated with 135 music examples that render it an incisive guide to fundamental chapters in modern and late modern art music.