Glass’s early instrumental works reflect a trend known as “minimalism,” which, like its visual arts counterpart, began to occupy a prominent aesthetic position during the 1960s. But it is Glass’s operas and other stage works, beginning in the 1970s, such as Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Satyagraha (1980), that have attracted widespread attention – works that include collaborations with notable figures such as film directors Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, stage directors Robert Wilson, Achim Freyer, JoAnne Akalaitis, Richard Foreman, and Phelim McDermott, and dancer–choreographers Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Susan Marshall, Maureen Fleming, and Twyla Tharp. Audience aficionados include opera lovers, rock musicians, music critics, painters, sculptors, fans of minimalist art, performance artists, and other constituencies. This is, in part, due to Glass’s eclectic interests and collaborative spirit, which have led him to merge music together with theater, dance, film, slides, graphic design, computer animation, photographs, and videos, including video walls and installations. These collaborations have helped place his work in a broad critical context and have attracted a wide audience from an unusually diverse array of followers.

Telemann’s complex relationship with the musical past encompassed a healthy respect for the works of previous generations (Lully, Corelli, and others), ambivalence about “ancient” music that was marked by impoverished melodies and contrapuntal excesses, and disdain for Ancients who rejected whatever was new. This chapter addresses yet another perspective, of a composer at pains to bring outmoded musical idioms into a meaningful dialogue with more modern ones. Two works in particular, church cantatas that Telemann composed in Frankfurt am Main, demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as rhetorically powerful tools for communicating a theological message. Whereas Sehet an die Exempel der Alten (TVWV 1:1259) cleverly caricatures music of the mid-seventeenth century, the striking dialogue cantata Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe (TVWV 1:459) casts a doubting, disconsolate Christian as a musical Ancient and the consoling Jesus as a Modern, an opposition vividly highlighted by text, musical style, and instrumentation. That Telemann’s reminiscences of the musical past are not cut of a purely nostalgic or ironic cloth but instead offer a productive dialogue with the musical present – one articulating an enlightened awareness of the divide between historical and present-day consciousnesses – may be read as evidence of the composer‘s extraordinary capacity for aesthetic and theological reflection.

This chapter maps the vast web of German-language theatres that connected Central European audiences around the year 1800. Using periodicals and missives written by those active at these institutions, it investigates how the network functioned in practice as well as how it was imagined across vast distances. It explores the mobility of theatre companies to at once redraw the theatrical map of late eighteenth-century Central Europe and challenge perceptions of oppositional court and public music cultures. The Reich's theatrical network simultaneously existed in the imaginary thanks to print culture and a reading public. While touring companies made the journey from one performance location to the next, readers could be transported to theatres scattered across the Empire with the turn of a page. This rendered the network as much a political and theatrical reality as an imaginary realm, where the bandwidth of data was as important as the institutions, personnel, repertoires, and developments the information conveyed. The Empire’s musico-theatrical complex – both physical and imaginary – was the foundation upon which a shared imperial repertoire could be cultivated.

In the foreword, Shipton sets out his approach of using multiple oral history sources to explore such topics as Duke Ellington's Orchestra, the Oscar Peterson Trio, and the role of the swing vocalist. He discusses such source material as interviews with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen, as well as with Clark Terry, Louie Bellson and Jimmy Woode. He pays attention to such female vocalists as Jewel Brown and Carmen Bradford. He then locates the book in terms of his own historical research, and ways in which a white European writer can approach African American music.

Guide, advisor, teacher, tutor – the connotations of ‘mentor’ are unambiguous enough, and the relationships that arose between the young and older Britten and more experienced acquaintances outside the immediate family are invariably matters of interest to biographers and critics. Britten first met the composer and conductor Frank Bridge in 1927, and remained in close contact until Britten’s move to America in 1939. He first met W. H. Auden on joining the GPO Film Unit in 1935, and soon encountered several of Auden’s literary associates, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. While in America (1939–42) Britten and Peter Pears lived for a time in Auden’s New York house, after a spell with the Mayer family on Long Island. The Bridges, the Mayers, and Auden and his associates all contributed to the social and aesthetic context within which Britten was able to produce his early compositions, and while a different set of mentors and friends could have had an identical effect, the distinctive qualities of those who actually filled these roles are what matters here. It was in Britten’s nature to resist potentially intrusive mentoring as much as to invite it.

This chapter deals with the earliest references to keyboard instruments in the writings of Martin Agricola, Henri Arnaut of Zwolle, Juan Bermudo, Ercole Bottrigari, Antonio de Cabezon, Eberhardus Cersne, Paulus Paulirinus, Hermann Poll, Michael Praetorius, Sesto Tantini, Sebastian Virdung, and others. Described is the earliest depiction of a keyboard instrument appearing in an altarpiece carving in the cathedral of Minden, Germany, as well as the earliest extant keyboard instrument, a clavicytherium made around 1480, now in the Royal College of Music, London. This chapter deals with the origin of such terms as the chekker, clavichordium, clavicembalo, clavicimbalo, clavicymbalum, claviciterium, clavicytherium, clavisimbalum, dulce melos, epinette, manichordium, monochordion, and monocordo. Also considered are the keyboard ranges of early keyboard instruments and the earliest music written for keyboard instruments, such as the Mulliner Book, the Robertsbridge fragment, and the Faenza Codex.

The opening chapter sets out the terminological and conceptual ideas that provide a basis for the remainder of the book. Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, it explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective. The second part of the chapter looks in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why? One of the properties of the idea of subjectivity identified here is that it is not a pre-given entity but a dynamic process that requires our own active participation for its interpretation. And thus while a number of conceptual questions still remain to be answered at the close of this chapter, it is given to the main body of the book to respond to these matters.

Chapter 1 contextualizes the performance of the refrain song within the feasts and seasons of the church and calendar year, situating the repertoire within in a pluralistic temporal framework. The Latin refrain and refrain song are identified as inherently seasonal and calendrical forms of musical expression, emerging out of broader clerical and monastic interest in musically amplifying specific periods of the year. In addition to examining the calendrical ordering of refrain songs across manuscript sources, this chapter considers how festive calendrical time was disciplined and reframed through song and refrain. This analysis is informed by the textual witnesses of Eudes Rigaud’s thirteenth-century Regestrum, and song collection prefaces attributed to Johannes de Perchausen and Bishop Richard Ledrede in the Moosburger Graduale and Red Book of Ossory, respectively. The chapter closes with a case study of refrains and refrains songs for the New Year (January 1), a highly contested day in the medieval year that fused popular and devotional rituals and, consequently, invited condemnation as well as musical and poetic accretions. Musico-poetic celebration of the New Year involved one refrain in particular, “annus novus,” leading to a dense network of associations between theological texts, devotional songs, and festive rituals.

The introduction examines the concept of italianità within its historical and cross-disciplinary context. Since the eighteenth century, music and especially opera have frequently been used as signifiers of national identity. Rousseau’s writings, and the responses they received, were particularly influential in associating music with national styles, reflecting linguistic conditions as well as the development of musical and operatic genres. These ideas resonated in debates on music, but also in travel writing and political thought, as exemplified in the works of de Staël, Stendhal and Goethe, but also Byron and Dickens. During the nineteenth century, often narrowly described as an age of nationalism, drawing connections between music and national character assumed a new dimension in political and aesthetic debates, partly due to the idea of reading opera as a contribution to processes of political emancipation. Especially in the non-European world, ideas about music were negotiated in relation to colonial and postcolonial experiences. But they also contributed to new notions of cosmopolitanism and a universal sense of belonging. The extent to which opera was intended to take a position within the political battles of national movements and global conflicts remains a matter of debate among opera scholars and historians.

A study of Elliot Carter reception history primarily in the postwar, Cold War period, also addressing postmodernism and disability studies.

Locus iste: This place. So begins the well-known sung text, or plainchant, forming part of the religious dedication of a building or altar. It can be found in hundreds of musical sources across Europe, from the earliest complete surviving antiphonary to include neumes (probably copied at the Swiss Benedictine monastery of Einsiedeln by Abbot Gregor the Englishman in the years around 960–70) to the printed liturgical books that circulated in the early sixteenth century, and up to the present day.1 The full gradual, Locus iste a Deo factum est inestimabile sacramentum irreprehensibilis est (‘This place was made inestimably sacred by God; it is beyond reproach’), emphasises the permanence and enduring holiness of ceremonial spaces within the Christian church. Its presence served as a performative connection between widely distributed churches and chapels and Rome, the spiritual centre of the Christian West. Religious buildings were all individually designed and decorated, and the unique liturgical books held within each one bear testament to the diverse services that were held there throughout the church year, from daily Mass to occasional rites such as baptism.2 Textual witnesses – manuscripts throughout the pre-Reformation period

Chapter 1 introduces the book in three ways: (1) by explaining the way French theatre life was organised; (2) by selected cultural overviews; (3) by comparing past and present attitudes to popular opera. After a preamble that defines genre terms used in the book, the institutional context is sketched out with reference to legal frameworks governing the ‘official’ stage, contrasted with the difficulties of popular opera. This was independent and commercial, active during the winter Fair (Saint Germain) and summer Fair (Saint Laurent) in Paris. In ‘Structures, Events and Systems’ popular theatre forms, including parodies, vaudevilles and marionette pieces, are related to legal imperatives. ‘Reflections of Society’ links popular opera to cultural contexts: events in French society; prose fiction; the tableau in theatre; and critical debates in the public sphere. ‘Chamfort’s Overview’ is an account of the most sophisticated generic definition of popular opera as it was understood before the Revolution. ‘Defending Popular Opera’ re-examines Pierre Nougaret’s problematic book De l’art du théâtre. ‘Conceptual Problems’ takes Sedaine and Monsigny’s Le Déserteur, once famous across Europe, as a case study in reception history of opéra-comique. Evidence suggests that understanding is more sought after than satisfied.

Chapter 1 explains the rationale for the book and the principles underlying its methodology. It introduces the two artists covered, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and the theorists used to contextualise their work: R. Serge Denisoff, Fredric Jameson, J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer. It summarises the concepts underlying each chapter – dual biography, protest music, history and spirituality – and explores the connections between these themes.

The marriage of Maria de’ Medici and King Henri IV in October 1600 was a triumph of Florentine diplomacy celebrated by a range of entertainments. Some were provided by the Medici, and others by young patricians such as Jacopo Corsi to gain their favor. They also used the occasion to display a novel form of musical theatre recently developed in Florence: opera. Euridice was performed on a temporary stage before a small audience in the Medici’s private residence (the Palazzo Pitti), and Il rapimento di Cefalo in the much larger Teatro degli Uffizi. Not all went well: members of the old guard, including the theatre designer Bernardo Buontalenti and the Florentine intellectual Giovanni de’ Bardi were highly critical. But the choice to have dramas presented entirely in music was both artistic and political. It also forced painters, poets, and musicians to create innovative solutions to typical theatrical problems. The archival documents presented here include inventories, financial accounts, and memoranda that pose important questions about the mechanisms for creating, administering, and funding such events, moving far beyond conventional notions of princely extravagance.

This chapter examines the political, social and economic factors that shaped the early development of Vienna’s public ball culture from the time Joseph II opened the imperial ballrooms to the public in 1772. The number of public dancing venues in the city expanded rapidly in the decades around 1800, resulting in an increased influence of the middle classes over Viennese dance culture, and the rise of a new area of professional musical life. These developments gave dance orchestras a prominent position in Vienna’s musical landscape, and contributed to the emergence of new listening practices associated with dance music.

Clara and Robert Schumann moved to Dresden in 1844, and resided there until 1850. Little is known about their social life in Dresden, although Schumann scholars have refuted both the notion of Dresden as a culturally underdeveloped town and the perception that Clara and Robert lacked artistic innovation during their residency there. Indeed, they initiated and participated in a number of spontaneous private visits, meals, soirées, organized musical circles, matinees and trios in their own or friends’ homes; walks and outings in the countryside; sociable visits to restaurants and coffee houses; and public events. All these served the shared purpose, albeit in different forms, of communication about and through music. By illuminating facets of the Schumanns’ private and semi-public life in Dresden from the perspective of interpersonal communication, this chapter offers insights into how Clara and Robert Schumann communicated with their contemporaries through physical meetings, letters, visual components (such as drawings and lines of poetry) in album leaves, and musical material, together with a discussion of how these communications influenced their artistic outlook. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on the blurred boundaries between private, semi-private and public domains, especially as these levels of communication were merged in the Schumanns’ lives.

The chapter explores two of Adès’s early works – Living Toys for fourteen players (1993) and America: A Prophecy, for soprano solo and orchestra with optional chorus (1999) – from the perspective of gesture as an 'energetic shaping' of sound (after Robert Hatten). Analyses synthesise small-scale events to wider emergent dramatic and expressive networks. The 'volatile' gestural sequence in Living Toys is a function of the score’s overtly programmatic scheme of seven dream-like scenarios, with a returning 'Hero’s' theme centre-stage in a score rich in agent-like instrumental solos. In America, gesture communicates a historical-mythic sequence, evoking the impending catastrophe of the sixteenth-century military conquest of Mayan civilisation by Spanish conquistadors. History runs its awful course in a sequence recounted verbally by the solo soprano as priestess. A gestural perspective elucidates Adès’s large-scale drama of complex images. Fracturings of musical tempo create an image of Mayan calendrical movement: triadic brass music evokes the moment of encounter, a 'battle' scene.

The ancestors of Franz Liszt settled near the northwestern borderlands of the Kingdom of Hungary during the eighteenth century, which was, to most, sovereign of all countries among the Habsburg Empire. The first member of the family to appear in the parish register of Rajka (an agricultural town on the shores of the Danube) was his great-grandfather, Sebastian List (c. 1703–93). Up until the early twentieth century, almost all members of this German-speaking family lived in this region, inhabited by ethnic Germans, Magyars and Slovaks.

Why a transnational history of Carmen? Because Carmen is intrinsically born of – and about –migration and linguistic fluidity, and because Bizet’s opera has been transcended by the myth or symbol of Carmen, taken to mean many things in multiple contexts. This chapter lays the foundations for the rest of the book by highlighting the main sources – Mérimée’s novella, the opera libretto, its first stagings and scores – as well as challenging the precepts of a transnational history of opera, and attempts to weave the individual chapters together, draw out overlapping themes, challenge expected narratives, point up contradictions. In short, whether in relation to genre, singers or binary oppositions of geography, identity, morality and progress, the chapter outlines the main debates addressed and synthesises the kaleidoscopic nature of the findings of all contributors. From Spanish gypsies to French Hispanomania in music and dance, from Parisian reception to transnationalism in opera studies, from Parisian opéra-comique to international hybrid spectacle, this chapter signals the issues that are omnipresent in the performance and reception of Carmen at home and abroad.

This chapter maps how students moved, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, between church and schoolroom, and the purposes religious music-making served in these contexts. It focuses on students’ performance of psalms, especially how particular performance practices (processing two-by-two) and the selection of psalms with moralizing texts inculcated potentially unruly children into the Protestant faith through bodily discipline and the act of communal singing. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Easter Psalms” sung at the Spital Sermon by children from the school at Christ’s Hospital as a multisensory event. Religious speech, music, and the display of the children’s bodies in their characteristic blue uniforms worked together to solicit charitable donations for the school and to demonstrate their piety, a performance practice that continues to this day. However, the potential for disruption, for something to go awry, for the script to be overturned is ever present, then and now.