Discusses the idea of “translation” and applies it to the flexibility of performance in early music.

Review of a CD of string music by Paul Ben-Haim. Touches on issues of identity, diaspora, and reception.

Several points of intersection exist between vocal and instrumental music by Italian composers of the early seventeenth century. First, like books of vocal monody with an overt pedagogical purpose, volumes of instrumental music may have been designed to instruct the performer in the conventions of the modern style. Specifically, many books…[Read more]

Connections between Johann Jacob Froberger’s harpsichord laments and other genres of keyboard and lute music (the unmeasured prelude, the tombeau and some allemandes) are by now well known. However, the ‘Méditation faite sur ma mort future’ (Meditation made on my future death), stands out for its connection-overlooked until now-with the French…[Read more]

Discusses the Capriccio stravagante by the Italian violin virtuoso Carlo Farina, as court Konzertmeister at the court of Saxony in Dresden. Suggests that the model for the Capriccio may be found in the many collections at the Dresden court and in the early modern strategies of learning, knowing and experiencing the world through the act of…[Read more]

In entitling his debut publication of 1617 Affetti musicali, Biagio Marini became the first composer to use the suggestive term affetti in the title of a book consisting entirely of instrumental music. Marini indicated that the book grew out of live music-making among a progressive group of Venetian listeners. Consideration of these social musical…[Read more]

A section of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s Magia naturalis (1589) celebrates the powers of musical instruments. Most of these powers are rooted in neo-Platonist natural magic: Della Porta explains that the materials of instruments retain their original properties, shaping the body and soul of the listener through their mutual sympathy or a…[Read more]

An essay is presented which explores the work with the exlibris of Zippora Wulff which survives in the collection of the Sing- Akademie: the Wechselgesang der Miijam und Debora by Justin Heinrich Knecht. It mentions that the relationship between ancient poetry and modern music. It mentions that Messias had already been held up by both Jewish and…[Read more]

Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle’s treatise La tonotechnie, ou l’art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music’s mouvement – its temporal flexibi…[Read more]

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers
frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations
they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description
and musical…[Read more]

The scholarly debate on the Guatemalan armed conflict continues to gravitate around the question of how the masses, and especially its indigenous sectors, understood and responded to the conflict between guerrilla and state sectors. This paper argues that an emphasis on passive victimhood and a theoretical fixation on resistance have obscured our…[Read more]