Volume 67, no. 2, of the Journal of the American Musicological Society—or JAMS, as it is familiarly known—is now live online. All four articles include embedded multimedia; two of the four are dedicated to the memory of Pierluigi Petrobelli (1932–2012), a much-admired Italian musicologist who was a Corresponding Member of the Society.
Subscriptions to the Journal of the American Musicological Society are included with AMS membership; the online version is available through JSTOR.
Here is the table of contents of the new issue, followed by abstracts of the four articles.
Journal of the American Musicological Society
VOLUME 67 · NUMBER 2 · SUMMER 2014Articles
Allegorical Architecture in Scivias: Hildegard’s Setting for the Ordo Virtutum
MARGOT E. FASSLER
“In the Church and in the Chapel”: Music and Devotional Spaces in the Florentine Church of Santissima Annunziata
GIOVANNI ZANOVELLO
Tartini and the Tongue of Saint Anthony
PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI
Winning and Losing in Russian New Music Today
WILLIAM QUILLEN
Colloquy
Studying the Lied: Hermeneutic Traditions and the Challenge of Performance
JENNIFER RONYAK, Convenor; BENJAMIN BINDER, LAURA TUNBRIDGE, WAYNE HEISLER JR., KIRA THURMAN, JONATHAN DUNSBY
Reviews
Josquin’s Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel, by Jesse Rodin
JULIE E. CUMMING
The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook, by Christoph Wolff and Markus Zepf; J. S.Bach at His Royal Instrument: Essays on His Organ Works, by Russell Stinson; and Bach’s Feet: The Organ Pedals in European Culture, by David Yearsley
ERNEST D. MAY
Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism, by David Charlton
GEORGIA J . COWART
Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical, by Todd Decker
TIM CARTER
ABSTRACTS
Allegorical Architecture in Scivias: Hildegard’s Setting for the Ordo Virtutum
MARGOT E. FASSLER
Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum has come to occupy a major role among Western European dramatic musical works, with scenes widely anthologized, multiple studies in print, and several recordings. I argue that the “setting” of Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum is the allegorical architecture created in her first major treatise, Scivias, written in the 1140s and early 1150s. In this period, while Hildegard was composing the play and writing her first major theological work, she was also designing a complex of new monastic buildings, which helps explain her concentration on architectural themes and images. Hildegard has situated the main “acts” of the play within allegorical towers, and the musical dimensions of the play are driven by its unfolding within this architectural understanding, including the “climbing” through the modes and the development of longer processional chants that link the action in one tower or pillar to that of another. We can see that the particular characters chosen for the play from a broad array of possibilities, underscore themes that relate to the lives and governance of Benedictine nuns. Hildegard's work provided parallels for her community between the allegorical architecture of Scivias, the play and its music, and the new church whose building was overseen by Hildegard.
“In the Church and in the Chapel”: Music and Devotional Spaces in the Florentine Church of Santissima Annunziata
GIOVANNI ZANOVELLO
Detailed payment records and notes preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze allow us to reconstruct the relationship of music and space in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata. In the late fifteenth century different musical styles and repertories came to define ritually the composite space of the church, one of the main houses belonging to the mendicant order of the Servants of Mary. This special role of music came into focus in the early 1470s and even more in the 1480s, when subsequent priors increased the musical activities, possibly to negotiate the new spatial features of the church after a consequential remodeling. Music thus helped organize key areas that had undergone architectural transformations, linking each part of the building to the specific rituals performed there through special sounds directed at the likely participants. The remodeling also involved a shift in the balance of power, with private patrons coming to control the virtual totality of the church. Music helped address this problem as well, by acoustically marking and reclaiming certain spaces as the friars' dedicated ritual sites, but also creating in its variety a nuanced representation of the community—both ordained and lay—that frequented the building.
Tartini and the Tongue of Saint Anthony
PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI
This article explores the nexus between Giuseppe Tartini's concertos for violin and orchestra, written for the Franciscan Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, and the devotion to this Saint's tongue, still preserved as a relic. Anthony's tongue, hagiographers write, was the instrument of a rhetoric that transcended verbal signification, able to move people of different languages and even animals. Soon, the tongue of Saint Anthony became a powerful symbol of universal language. In the eighteenth century, the Catholic Church, and especially the followers of Saint Anthony, revitalized their global mission to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers. Commissioning orchestral church music was part of this strategy. Like Anthony's preaching, Tartini's music was informed by the utopian goal to reach out to a pluralist community. His music and ideas attracted the attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Burney, both engaged in contemporary debates on the quest for universality of music in a multicultural world. Newly discovered evidence sheds light on the liturgical context of Tartini's violin concertos, as well as on religious rituals of music making and listening that left long-lasting traces of sacrality in the secular rites of production and consumption of instrumental music.
Winning and Losing in Russian New Music Today
WILLIAM QUILLEN
This article examines some of the organizational changes shaping Russian new music from the collapse of the USSR in 1991 to the present and their consequences for composers active in Russia today. The Soviet collapse triggered significant transformations in how new music in Russia is funded, where and by whom it is performed, and how it is promoted and distributed. These developments have affected the opportunities available to contemporary Russian composers, their strategies for career success, and how they envision their place vis-à-vis other composers or within society at large. More significantly, such changes have shaped individual composers' creative practices: as composers moved into new collaborative networks after the Soviet collapse; as the resources at their disposal changed; and as they composed for new performers, markets, or patrons, so, too, did their styles change. In explaining musical developments from an organizational perspective, this article draws upon theories from the sociology of culture literature, in particular Howard Becker's idea of “art worlds” and the production-of-culture perspective developed by Richard Peterson and others. The article also considers factors other than organizational ones affecting Russian music today, including the generational shift presently underway as members of post-Soviet birth cohorts enter the professional ranks.