The ethnical factor in european literature for the organ in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries based on works by british, italian and Jewish Composers

The article presents examples of the emphasised ethnical factor in works belonging to the European organ literature of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, found in pieces written by British, Italian and Jewish composers. In case of British composers, significant were the proposals of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who primarily saw folk songs as the tool for expressing a national style. Among the composers who wrote music inspired by traditional songs or quoting them directly (which was an important novelty in the British organ literature) were: Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Percy Whitlock, Cyril Bradley Rootham, Geoffrey Turton Shaw, Harold Carpenter Lumb Stocks, and more. The influence of national elements on Italian organ literature is not as strong but it seems justified to assume that some composers might have been influenced by the romanità myth which identified the features of the Italian nation with the ideas allegedly drawn from the traditions of ancient Rome. These composers were Giuseppe Corsi and Alfredo Casella. It is worth paying attention to the phenomenon of writing organ masses which preceded the popularisation of that myth. In this context, composers of Jewish organ music attempted to emphasise the ethnical factor in their works in the clearest, most consequent and most comprehensive ways possible. Abraham Zevi Idelsohn summed up their ideological programme, indicating that music meant for being performed in synagogues, including Jewish organ music, should be based on traditional melodies and scales, at the same time using tonal harmonic systems, which was supposed to allow for introducing prayerful atmosphere and concentration of the audience as well as understanding it properly. This group of composers included Louis Lewandowski, David Nowakowski, Arno Nadel, and others.

Whitman and Stevenson: Singing the Nation from Scotland to Sāmoa via Ohio and Hawai‘i

This chapter explores the role of song in the intermingled reception of Whitman’s and Robert Louis Stevenson’s work. The first section introduces Stevenson’s part in disseminating Whitman’s work in Polynesia, discussing Stevenson’s writings on Polynesian song and his friendships with Hawai’ian musicians King David Kalākaua and Queen Liliʻuokalani with whom he shared an interest in Whitman. It suggests the importance of song to their understandings of cultural authority and challenges to colonial influence. The second section considers several composers – including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ernst Bacon – who set work by both Whitman and Stevenson, focusing particularly on James H. Rogers’ song cycle In Memoriam (1919). It considers the ways in which relationship between the two writers was constructed by these composers and their critics and explores the role of anthologising – whether in poetry anthologies or song cycles – in constructions of national identity and exoticism.

Multilevel grounded semantics across cognitive modalities: Music, vision, poetry

This article extends the author’s theory of multilevel grounding in meaning generation from its original application to music to the domains of visual cognition and poetry. Based on the notions of ground from the philosophy of language and conceptual blending from cognitive linguistics, the approach views semiosis in works of art as a series of successive mappings couched in a set of six hierarchical, recursive levels of constraint or grounding boxes: (1) perceptual, parsing the stimulus into formal gestalten; (2) cross-modal, motivating schematic correspondences between the stimulus so structured and the listener’s embodied experience; (3) affective, ascribing to this embodied appreciation dynamic sensations, as in the distinction between tense and lax parts of the perceptual flow; (4) conceptual, drawing analogies between such schematic and affective appreciation and elementary experiential imagery, resulting in outlines of narratives; (5) culturally rich, checking such a narrative outline against the recipient’s cultural knowledge; and (6) individual, adding to the levels above idiosyncratic recollections from the participant’s personal experience. The goal of the analysis is to show that the interpretation of constructs from different semiotic modes (music, vision and language) may rely on the same grounding levels as it ultimately depends on the same perceptual, embodied and contextual circumstances. Specifically, the article uses the system to analyse the possible reception of a section from the romance for violin and orchestra ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the painting ‘The Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci and the poem ‘No Man Is an Island’ by John Donne.

The Lady Composer Learns Her Craft

The period of Dring’s life as a full-time student at the Royal College of Music overlapped with the concluding years of World War II. The director of the RCM, George Dyson, decided to keep the school open, and Dring’s diaries provide a picture of her life during the first years of the war. Principal teachers included W.H. Reed in violin, Lilian Gaskell in piano, Topliss Green in voice, and Margaret Rubel in “dramatic.” Dring continued to be active as a performer, earning her ARCM certificate in piano, and she performed in many plays and scenes as part of the dramatic class. She also had the opportunity to produce, direct, and write the music for The Emperor and the Nightingale, the annual Christmas play for the Junior Department. Her most important instructor was Herbert Howells in composition, with whom she studied for her entire four years as a full-time student, and she also took occasional lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams. Her musical style is discussed through an examination of “Under the Greenwood Tree,” the first of her Three Shakespeare Songs, written and first performed during these years.

English Pastoral Music

This book examines the nature and style of pastoralism, one of twentieth-century England’s most widespread and influential musical movements. Long dismissed as provincial, escapist, and reactionary, pastoral music in fact represents a distinctively English approach to modernist composition during the early twentieth century, adapting and transforming established musical and aesthetic conventions to reflect the experiences of British composers and audiences. Covering a wide expressive range—from songs of praise to symphonies of commemoration, lush Arcadian dramatic scenes to bleak neotonal landscapes—English pastoral music encompasses an array of applications, meanings, and stylistic inflections that oblige us to reassess its cultural and idiomatic significance. The book opens with a survey of pastoral music’s critical, theoretical, and stylistic foundations before moving on to examine its specific manifestations in the contexts of Arcadia, war, landscape, and the Utopian imagination. Works by well-known figures such as Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Benjamin Britten are considered, as well as pieces by lesser-known composers such as E. J. Moeran, Ivor Gurney, Constant Lambert, and John Ireland, among others. Their diverse approaches to pastoralism not only reveal the breadth of its stylistic influence, but the depth of its philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings.