Music to Shakespeare. A Practical Catalogue of Current Incidental Music, Song Settings and Other Related Music

Notes ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 1038
Author(s):  
F. W. Sternfeld ◽  
Alan Bousted
2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Stefan Wolkenfeld

Der Musikwissenschaftler August Wilhelm Ambros (1816-1876) spielte als Feuilletonist und Komponist im Prager Musikleben der 1840er Jahre eine wichtige Rolle. Seine 1848 komponierte Schauspielmusik zu William Shakespeares "Othello" (die in Prag zahlreiche Aufführungen erlebte) wurde nie publiziert und galt als verschollen. Diese Ansicht muss revidiert werden. Das Autograph der Komposition befindet sich seit 1939 unbeachtet im Besitz der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Die erste Sichtung ergab folgenden Befund: Ambros hat sich an dem für eine Schauspielmusik üblichen Modell orientiert. Neben Ouvertüre und Finale besteht die Komposition aus mehreren Zwischenaktmusiken, die durch die Handlung des Dramas miteinander verknüpft sind. Stilistisch orientiert sich die Komposition an den Werken Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys und Robert Schumanns, die für den Prager Davidsbündler Ambros als wichtige Vorbilder fungierten. Durch die Entdeckung der Schauspielmusik zu "Othello" lässt sich diese immer wieder betonte Nähe nun an einem größeren Werk untersuchen.    The musicologist August Wilhelm Ambros (1816-1876) played an important role as feature writer and composer in the musical life of Prague during the 1840s. In 1848 he composed an incidental music for William Shakespeare's drama "Othello" which was performed in Prague for several times, but never was published. It has been considered to be lost, what has to be revised. The autograph of the composition is owned by the Austrian National Library since 1939, but has met with no response so far. The results of a first investigation are: the music to the drama "Othello" does not diverge from the common patterns of this genre. It consists an overture, a finale and some intermission music. Its style is affected, like most of Ambros' other compositions, by Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The recovering of this composition now allows to research this influence on a larger opus. 


PMLA ◽  
1939 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-152
Author(s):  
Ernest Brennecke
Keyword(s):  

Shakespeare's intimate acquaintance with the music of his time and his enthusiasm for the art are well known, and there can be little question that he consorted to some extent with the London musicians of 1600. Certain of them may have been actively associated with the production, and possibly with the composition, of his plays. Precisely what form such association took, however, is a matter upon which investigation has hitherto yielded only meagre and confusing results. Speculation links Shakespeare's name with many composers and performers of the period, some of whom must indeed have supplied both the incidental music so abundantly required for his stage productions and the earliest settings of his lyrics.


Muzikologija ◽  
2005 ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
Nadezda Mosusova

The junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe sharpened the clash of artistic novelties in the Western and Slavonic worlds, caused by developed Symbolism and Expressionism. As an output of the former reappeared in the "Jahrhundertwende" the transformed characters of the Commedia dell'arte, flourished in art, literature and music in Italy France, Austria and Russia. Exponents of Italian Renaissance theatre Stravinsky's Petrushka (1911) and Sch?nberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) turned soon to be main works of the Russian and Austrian expressionistic music style, inaugurated by Strauss's Salome, which won opera stages from the 1905 on. Influences of the latter were widespread and unexpected, reaching later the "remote" areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as the Balkans (in 1907 the Canadian dancer Maud Allan performed The Vision of Salome in Belgrade - music Marcel Remy - making her debut in Vienna 1903). Compositions of Strauss and Sch?nberg (Erwartung included) reflected also the strong cult of death present in Vienna's Finde-si?cle Symbolism concerning among other works plays by Wedekind and Schnitzler (Veil of Pierrette was staged successfully in Russia, too), with prototypes in Schumann's Carnival and Masquerade by Lermontov (both works written in 1834!). It was not by chance that Schumann's piano suite became one of the first ballets of Diaghilev's Saisons Russes (1910) and Masquerade, performed with the incidental music by Alexander Glazunov, the last pre-revolutionary piece of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1917).


Comunicar ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (37) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amparo Porta-Navarro

The music that children are exposed to in their everyday lives plays an important role in shaping the way they interpret the world around them, and television soundtracks are, together with their direct experience of reality, one of the most significant sources of such input. This work is part of a broader research project that looks at what kind of music children listen to in a sample of Latin American and Spanish TV programmes. More specifically, this study focuses on children’s programmes in Spain, and was addressed using a semiotic theoretical framework with a quantitative and musical approach. The programme «Los Lunnis» was chosen as the subject of a preliminary study, which consisted in applying 90 templates and then analysing them in terms of the musical content. The results show that the programme uses music both as the leading figure and as a background element. The most common texture is the accompanied monody and the use of voice, and there is a predominance of electronic instrumental sounds, binary stress and major modes with modulations. Musical pieces are sometimes truncated and rhythmically the music is quite poor; the style used is predominantly that of foreign popular music, with a few allusions to the classical style and to incidental music. The data reveal the presence of music in cultural and patrimonial aspects, as well as in cognitive construction, which were not taken into account in studies on the influence of TV in Spain. Such aspects do emerge, however, when they are reviewed from the perspective of semiotics, musical representation, formal analysis and restructuring theories.La música de la vida cotidiana del niño tiene uno de sus referentes, junto a su experiencia real, en la banda sonora de la televisión, configurando una parte de su interpretación de la realidad. Este trabajo forma parte de una investigación más amplia sobre la escucha televisiva infantil en una muestra iberoamericana. El objetivo, conocer qué escuchan los niños en la programación infantil de «Televisión Española», ha sido estudiado desde un marco teórico semiótico con un enfoque cuantitativo y musical. El artículo presenta un resumen de los resultados obtenidos en un primer análisis del programa «Los Lunnis» mediante la aplicación de noventa plantillas y sus análisis musicales correspondientes. Estos resultados indican que el programa utiliza la música como fondo y figura, textura de monodía acompañada y utilización de la voz, predominio del sonido electrónico instrumental, acento binario y modo mayor con modulaciones. Aparecen piezas musicales cortadas y cierta pobreza rítmica, su opción estilística es la música popular no propia, con algunos guiños al estilo clásico y a la música incidental. Los datos muestran la presencia de la música en aspectos culturales, patrimoniales y de construcción cognitiva no considerados en los estudios sobre la influencia de la TV en España, pero que emergen cuando son revisados desde la semiótica, la representación musical, el análisis formal y las teorías de la reestructuración.


Georges Auric ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 113-132
Author(s):  
Colin Roust

During the Popular Front Years (1934–1939), Auric’s politics swung to the left and he joined several arts organizations of the French Communist Party. His populist works from these years include numerous pieces of incidental music and film scores, but also concert music, music for young musicians, campfire songs, and other popular songs. Although his music hardly changed stylistically from the 1920s, he now actively reached out to the broadest audiences possible. During the German Occupation, Auric joined or otherwise contributed to several intellectual networks of the French Resistance. His war-time roles would result in a privileged position after the war, as a leading critic and arts administrator.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Forbes

Between 1905 and 1908 Percy Grainger made a major contribution to the corpus of British folk-song, collecting melodies and words of ballads, shanties and work songs, and devoting himself not just to the faithful capture of pitch and rhythm, but also the nuances of performance, with his pioneering use of the phonograph. These folk-songs became for Grainger a wellspring of compositional inspiration to which he returned time and time again. Yet while he was still a student in Frankfurt, Grainger had been making settings of British traditional tunes sourced from published collections. This article contends that these early arrangements hold the key to a deeper understanding of his later persistence in folk-song arranging and collecting, and that they prefigure the recurrent textual themes in the songs he later chose to arrange. It is argued that Grainger’s attraction to folk-song was textual and musical, tied to notions of purity, freedom and an unorthodox spirituality inspired by nature and shaped by the writings of Whitman, whereby Grainger perceived folk-song as a universal utterance. For Grainger, British folk-song was not simply a source of profound melody for appropriation; the window into a nation’s soul became a door into the souls of all humanity.


Author(s):  
Patrick Warfield

This chapter details John Philip Sousa's career as a violinist, his earliest efforts as a composer, and his first tours away from Washington as a professional theater musician. By 1874, Sousa had gained at least some experience as a violinist for light opera, the tradition in which he would soon make his mark as an arranger and composer. Sousa also worked at the Washington Theatre Comique. Moreover, he published three works during the early 1970s, all piano pieces on dance forms: Moonlight on the Potomac Waltzes, “Review,” and “Cuckoo.” While Sousa was conducting incidental music for Milton Nobles's play Jim Bludso, or, Bohemians and Detectives—which was presented at Kernan's Theatre Comique between June 21 and June 26, 1875—Nobles was impressed by the young conductor, and a few days later he sent Sousa a telegram asking that he join the troupe on tour. Sousa would then tour the Midwest and the southern United States for the next two months.


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