The issue and performance of previously unpublished musical works — juvenilia, early pieces, and even completions by others of music left by composers, for one reason or another, incomplete — always provokes interesting debate. Would the composer have wanted it? Does the newly presented work serve the best interests of the composer’s reputation? Does the music throw new (or even controversial) light on ‘the life and works’?

With Sir Edward Elgar, the recent recording of the quadrilles and polkas that he wrote as a young man for entertainment at the Powick Asylum generated mild interest, but in 1998 Anthony Payne’s completion of the third symphony sketches and fragments left by Elgar at the end his life (and now in the British Library) caused a sensation. Payne called his work an ‘elaboration’ of Elgar’s sketches and — overnight, and fair and square — it gave the world a fine and substantial new piece. If not written by Sir Edward, it is by all counts completely worthy of him, a remarkable tribute, and something by way of repayment by one of his admirers. All the British composers that followed Elgar — such as Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) — owe him a debt.

As a young man and ‘apprentice’ composer, Vaughan Williams wrote much music (chamber works, orchestral pieces, choral works) which received performances at the time, but which he subsequently withdrew. Ursula Vaughan Williams, his widow, ensured that, where possible, the manuscripts for these early works were preserved (the majority were to be deposited in the British Library, along with those of the published works), but during her lifetime generally continued her husband’s policy of not allowing performance or publication.

Towards the end of her life (she died in 2007, almost fifty years after Vaughan Williams) Ursula relaxed her view, realizing the cultural and artistic value of releasing at least a selection of her husband’s early and by now forgotten works (really, the only information about them then available to the public was their listings in Michael Kennedy’s complete catalogue of Vaughan Williams’ works). Since her death The Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust has continued to release selected works, either previously unpublished or earlier versions of works already in the repertoire, to each of the composer’s original music publishers (there were several) or their successors. Such releases include early chamber music to Faber Music and the original (longer) version of A London Symphony to Stainer & Bell.

In 2009 Oxford University Press (OUP) published a small and previously unknown carol by Vaughan Williams (O My Dear Heart), but OUP’s recent issues of unpublished Vaughan Williams titles have been exclusively of orchestral works. The Solent was written in 1902/3 and was planned to be one part of a four-movement orchestral ‘impressions’ of the New Forest. It received a private performance on 19 June 1903 and was then forgotten, although Vaughan Williams made use of one of its themes in at least one later work (his ninth symphony, written shortly before his death). The Serenade in A Minor dates from five years earlier, and was heard at Bournemouth in April 1904 and again in London’s Aeolian Hall in 1908. Like The Solent, it was then forgotten. These two works are being performed on 24 May as part of the English Music Festival, in a ‘Searching for English Music’ concert at Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire, with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates. These performances will bring two early scores by Vaughan Williams to the ears of modern audiences for the first time, and will allow listeners to judge for themselves just how and where they fit into the already large and popular oeuvre of this celebrated English composer. The score for Serenade was published by OUP in 2012, and that for The Solent will be issued later this year.

Later this summer, we hear Anthony Payne’s re-imagining not of Elgar but of another Vaughan Williams score. At the request of the BBC he has orchestrated the Four Last Songs, written by Vaughan Williams (originally for voice and piano) to poems by Ursula in the last years of his life, and published posthumously by OUP. Payne’s orchestration will be heard at the Royal Albert Hall in a BBC Promenade Concert on 4 September 2013. New versions of works by Vaughan Williams? The composer would most definitely have approved, but that is another story.

Simon Wright is Head of Rights & Contracts, Music at Oxford University Press. Read his previous blog post: “Sinfonia Antartica: ‘Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free’.”

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Image credit: Portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams courtesy of OUP sheet music department. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

The post The old shall be made new appeared first on OUPblog.

The centenary of the 29 May 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is being celebrated by numerous orchestras and ballet companies this year, which is always worth mentioning when that first performance incited a riot. The ballet (also performed as an orchestra piece) depicts a collection of pagan spring rituals involving fortune telling, holy processions, and culminating in l’élue (the elected one) dancing herself to death. It was not the subject matter but the music and choreography that upset that first audience 100 years ago. Indeed, according to this interview with Stravinsky, even during the compositional process the composer was upsetting people, namely his collaborators:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s clear from the video that Stravinsky knew how uncommon-sounding and challenging the work would be for his listeners. He also seemed delightfully aware of the piece’s significance for the story of Western art music. The eight-note chord is “new,” and the accents are “even more new.” New how? Taking into consideration Stravinsky’s education (the musical part, not the law school part) and the cultural milieu in which he placed himself, it’s safe to say he was thinking in terms of the circa 250 year old Western European tonal tradition when he used the word “new.” The eight note chord was new because it eschewed the traditionally three or four note construction of tonal chords.

The chord that Stravinsky plays in the video is notated above (the chord is the left-most one in the example). By taking two traditionally constructed chords, F-flat major and E-flat seven, and stacking them on top of each other, he has created a polychord that has a much more complex sound than either of the two chords as heard separately.

The accents were “even more new” because they disrupted the metrical norms of the tonal style (in which the strongest beat happens at the beginning of the measure) by rendering the beat uneven.

Traditionally, accents denote the beginning of a measure that contains a recurring number of beats; it’s part of how we mentally divide up time when we play or listen to music. As you can see in the example above, Stravinsky disrupts that regularity by essentially restarting the beat-division at unusual points in the measure (I’ve tried to demonstrate this by numbering the eighth notes).

What’s interesting is that Stravinsky’s polychords and persistent syncopating of the beat weren’t actually the newest “new” sounds around at the time of Rite’s premiere. A group of Austrians were already composing music that disregarded tonality and meter altogether. Nevertheless, Stravinsky’s music deviated sufficiently from tonal norms for it to sound somewhat shocking to his first listeners.

Today The Rite of Spring still sounds new, even to someone like me who spends so much time listening to recently composed, avant garde music. If you haven’t heard the piece, I highly recommend doing so (perhaps this recording from jazz trio The Bad Plus will spark your interest); better yet, see it live if you can. And no need to worry, it’s been nearly a century since it caused a riot.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that the Eurovision Song Contest has a unique appeal. Although often seen as tacky, extravagant and occasionally politically controversial, that doesn’t stop around 125 million people around the world watching it each year! It has helped to launch careers, in the cases of ABBA and Bucks Fizz, as well as destroy them (cast your memories back to Jemini, aka ‘nul points’).

To celebrate the 58^th contest which takes place tomorrow night, we’ve put together a playlist of the best and worst entries in Eurovision history as well as some interesting (as well as bizarre) facts about the competition.

Fun facts about Eurovision

• The first Eurovision Song Contest took place in Switzerland, with only 7 countries competing.
• This year’s competition takes place in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. Did you know that Malmö’s football team, Malmö FF, is where footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović began his professional career?
• Ireland is the most successful country in the Contest, winning 7 times, 3 of which were in consecutive years (1992, 1993 and 1994).
• Portugal has competed since 1964 and is yet to finish in the top 5. The highest they have placed is 6^th, which was in 1996.
• Norway’s Alexander Rybak is the record-holder for the highest amount of points, scoring 387 in 2009. Closely followed by last year’s winner, Loreen from Sweden, who won with 372 points.
• The maximum duration of each performance is 3 minutes.
• A Eurovision song must always have vocals; purely instrumental music is not permitted.
• No live animals are allowed on stage during a performance.
• However, the costume options are pretty much limitless . . . . .

Annie Leyman is Marketing Executive for Music books at Oxford University Press.

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Image credits: (1) Photo of ABBA. By AVRO (FTA001019454_012 from Beeld & Geluid wiki) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons (2) Photo of Lordi performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin (http://nagi.ee/photos/sAgApO/824612/in-set/17031/) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (3) Photo of Verka Serduchka performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (4) Photo of Jedward at ESC 2011. By Frédéric de Villamil (Flickr: DSC_9298) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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I recently travelled with the band Victoire for a brief residency at the music school of a large university. As well as performing a concert, we spoke to the music majors there on the topic of “alternative career paths” in classical music. By “alternative” I mean career paths other than playing in an orchestra or teaching at an academic institution. In our case, the musicians of Victoire all work predominantly in the performance and composition of contemporary classical music.

During the workshop one of the school’s composition students asked me how I approach playing the clarinet in Victoire differently from how I approach playing clarinet in Newspeak, another contemporary music ensemble I perform with and co-direct. It was a good question, and showed that the asker had done enough background research to know how much these two ensembles differ. It was the kind of question that might lead to long and interesting discussions. But it stumped me; I simply hadn’t thought about my playing in these terms before.

In some ways the question made no sense to me. All I could answer was, “I don’t.” As far as I was concerned my approach to these two projects was the same as my approach to any piece of music. I put the music on my stand, figure out the technical requirements and stylistic characteristics, and play it. Does that count as an approach? If so, I approach all music in the same way. Compare these two excerpts from Newspeak and Victoire:

Newspeak
B & E (with aggravated assault)
By Oscar Bettison
From the album sweet light crude

Listen to this track.

Victoire
Cathedral City
By Missy Mazzoli
From the album Cathedral City

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s true that these two excerpts sound different from one another. Oscar Bettison’s work is louder and more aggressive (as well as being played on bass clarinet). The Victoire track (written by Missy Mazzoli) is less accented, more mellifluous. But I don’t put on vastly different hats when I perform with these two groups. Over the next few weeks the question continued to bother me. Did I have different approaches? Should I have different approaches?

Perhaps, I thought, I would have answered differently if the question had mentioned projects I’ve worked on that were stylistically further from one of these excerpts — like playing works by Matthias Spahlinger with Wet Ink or Oliver Knussen with Signal Ensemble. If I moved between more widely separated styles — like classical music or jazz or Klezmer — then perhaps I would switch “approaches” between styles (a question I look forward to discussing with colleagues). Or perhaps it would have made more sense if I had been asked if I approach playing something older like Mozart differently to the more contemporary music I usually play. In that case, having considered the piece stylistically, I would try to use Mozart-appropriate timbres, phrasing and articulations. But it’s all the same process — choosing techniques and stylistic elements that are appropriate — that I would follow for any piece. The specifics of the end result are different, but it doesn’t seem like an entirely different approach.

Most musical instruments (and I might with bias say especially the clarinet) have the potential to make an enormously wide range of sounds. This is one of the underpinnings of the explosion of modern music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the classical tradition for various reasons — acoustic and aesthetic (enough for another post) — instrumentalists have tended to stay within a smaller range of possible sounds. However, from the 1950s onwards, composers and performers, perhaps spurred on by the infinite sonic possibilities of electronic music, experimented a lot more with sounds that in the past had been rejected as incorrect — so-called extended techniques: multiphonics, air sounds, squeaks, different articulations, etc. These days as a performer it is pretty much de rigueur to learn to use and control at least some of these extended techniques.

The compositional landscape we inhabit now is, happily, stylistically diverse, with composers taking inspiration from any and all past streams of classical music, as well as from other kinds of music and from pure sound. So instead of always having exactly the same set of tones and articulations, an instrumentalist might at times use not just “extended” techniques but timbres and techniques borrowed from other kinds of music or even other instruments.

The result is that one player can be equipped with a huge range of sound possibilities. Each piece, or situation, involves the choice of a range of sounds, like colors from a paintbox: for Mozart a particular sound world; for Spahlinger another; still others for Knussen or Mazzoli or Bettison. Of course there is almost always overlap, as many of the basic sounds and techniques will be the same. So, to answer the original question: instead of “approach” I would say that each piece has a different “palette” and within that are different techniques and timbres that are achieved in various ways (which is perhaps what the question was intended to be about). The important thing is to “approach” each piece as being open to a full range of possibilities, so that a piece by Lachenmann doesn’t necessarily have to sound like one by Mozart, or Mazzoli like Bettison.

Clarinetist Eileen Mack grew up in Australia and is now based in New York. She is a member of post-minimalist band Victoire and the amplified ensemble Newspeak (which she also co-directs), and has performed with many other New York new music groups including Wet Ink, Alarm Will Sound, Signal Ensemble, the Bang on a Can All Stars and the Wordless Music Orchestra.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Image credit: Clarinet. © THEPALMER via iStockphoto.

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When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever. Certainly as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the contest created a degree of national fervour in Britain, and I suspect in most other parts of Europe. At its peak, it’s estimated to have drawn in around 600 million viewers worldwide.

The competition’s only seldom been part of the pop mainstream, and at the time when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were becoming world famous in the 1960s, Britain entered the bland sounds of Kathy Kirby and Matt Monroe instead. It took Britain’s first two wins, by Sandie Shaw in 1967 and Lulu in 1969 to bring about a convergence of pop culture and the more mainstream vocal entertainment of the contest. Meanwhile 1950s heart-throb and subsequent film-star Cliff Richard was controversially beaten into second place in 1968 with “Congratulations” — a song that has stood the test of time rather better than Spain’s winning “La La La,” (sung in Spanish by Massiel after the original Catalan entry by Joan Manuel Serrat was withdrawn by the Franco regime). Abba’s success with “Waterloo” in 1974 marks one of the few genuine moments when the contest reflected wider international taste. They aimed squarely at winning and did so, bringing their distinctive sound and utter professionalism to a vastly greater audience through their success in the competition. Some other acts were successfully launched on the world stage as a result of first being seen by an international audience during the finals, including early appearances by Julio Iglesias and Céline Dion.

Yet that is one of the reasons the contest is so fascinating. At a time when European monetary and political convergence is a burning question for governments, the Eurovision contest demonstrates just how varied approaches are to popular songs and entertainment across the continent, from Portugal to Azerbaijan, and from Norway to Israel. Dance moves, costumes, gestures, lyrics, and language convey insights into how other European countries go about the business of entertainment in a far more insightful way than almost any other television spectacular. Ukranian drag queen Verka Serduchka’s antics and lyrics upset Russia in 2007, but in 2006 Finnish heavy metal band Lordi took the world by storm in an over-the-top performance with latex masks, prosthetic beards and horns. Amazingly, they managed to convey rock and roll as a religion without alienating too many special interest groups.

Even back in the 1960s as we crouched round the flickering image of our black and white televisions, the voting system seemed arcane. It still does. The results can sometimes be skewed by blocs of countries who vote together for, one suspects, not entirely artistic reasons. Announced first in French and then English, the underdogs who only score “nil points” often become popular with the viewing audience for that very reason. Poor old Jemini gave the UK its first “nil points” in 2003, but in 1997 Portugal and Norway shared the ignominy of no votes at all, and in 1983 the same fate befell Turkey and Spain. Norway still holds the record for the greatest number of “nil points”. The term has entered the European vernacular, in many countries, describing a competitor who tries hard but with no hope of winning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now this year’s contest is under way in Malmö, Sweden, what can we expect? The sheer number of competing countries now means two nights of semis before the final, which takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013. The bookies are backing Denmark and Norway to triumph in this very Nordic contest, but I have a hunch that after Engelbert Humperdinck’s not entirely satisfactory entry last year, the Scandinavians will be given a run for their money by British entry Bonnie Tyler. A legend of 80s pop with her great hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Tyler is a Welsh singer who has the rare distinction of also topping the charts in France. She has also had hit records in Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. When it comes to tactical voting, she’s potentially got a lot of different countries on her side! At least the title of her entry is a little more modest than Cliff Richard’s from 1968: it’s called “Believe In Me”.

Alyn Shipton is the author of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, to be published on July 18. He is also a critic for The Times in London and presents jazz programmes on BBC Radio.

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What is it about the sounds of baseball that make them musical, and so easily romanticized? In Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, George Plimpton says that “Baseball has these absolutely unique sounds. The sounds of spring and summer….The sound of the ball against the bat is absolutely extraordinary. I don’t know any American male that doesn’t hear that in the springtime and get called back to some moment in the past.” These sounds are especially vivid in a game that’s often so quiet.

It’s been made the subject of numerous songs, many of which are collected and fully digitized in the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Each song is freely available to the public to peruse and parody, including one of the most iconic American songs ever written, “Take me out to the ballgame,” written by Albert Von Tilzer, with lyrics by Jack Norworth. (I’ve been wondering lately if all of Norworth’s lyrics make him sound like a freeloader. He doesn’t pay for the game; he doesn’t pay for the concessions. Maybe the fact that he’d never been out to a ballgame when he wrote the song can be explained by the fact that no one wanted to take him.)

Baseball even gave us the first documented use of the word “jazz.” According to the OED, in 1912 a professional pitcher describing his curve ball was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.”

Despite its connections with the musical world, I have to admit now to a long-standing personal indifference towards the sport. My first-hand experience is limited to a third grade T-ball championship and some horrifying moments in co-ed little league. Baseball was never on TV at home when I grew up, and I’d become immediately bored if I even glanced at a game.

I’ve slowly come around to it (thanks in part to my boyfriend, who wrote the article on baseball songs linked above) to the point where I was comforting myself the day after the Boston Marathon bombing by watching the New York Yankees’ home game against the Arizona Diamondbacks on TV. As Plimpton said, the sounds of the game do bring me back to old memories of summer days (though I’m actually an American female, I think it still counts), and watching the game was having a calming effect on me.

After two and a half innings, the commentators told the audience at home that the song “Sweet Caroline” was going to be played in the stadium, and that they’d broadcast it for those watching at home.

I was moved: “Sweet Caroline” is a Boston song. I know next to nothing about baseball culture, but I learned that much from my two years living in Massachusetts. It’s been played at Red Sox games for years, despite the lyrics having no obvious connections to either sports or Boston.

A 2005 story in the Boston Globe traced the origins of the song’s  use there to Amy Tobey, who was in charge of picking the music that would play at Fenway Park from 1998–2004. She’d heard the song at other sporting events and decided to play it in Boston. It was very well-received. The song has been played in the eighth inning of every home game there since 2002; that’s more than 800 eighth-inning sing-alongs over the last decade.

Experience has taught me that, prior to the game on the 16th of April, singing “Sweet Caroline” in Yankee Stadium would probably earn you a few dirty looks, which must be difficult for all those Yankees fans who also happen to be Neil Diamond enthusiasts. So, taking advantage both of an opportunity to show that they were thinking of Boston’s residents and of the only chance they might ever have to yell “So good! So good!” in the stands at Yankee Stadium, the crowd looked like this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I found the gesture incredibly touching. When I described it to other people the next day, I remembered it being exclusively full of joyful, smiling singers-along. When I watch that video now, almost a month later, it feels a little more staid. Maybe a lot of people felt too sad about the attack to express support that way; maybe a lot of people just didn’t like singing. Maybe in my excitement at recognizing this sports-culture event as it was happening, I remembered it being a little more dramatic.

The crowd looked smaller than the reported attendance of 34,107, but there were still thousands of people for the camera operators to focus on. I wonder why they chose the ones they did, the fans who were in turn waving at the camera, leaning on each other, talking, slowly eating an ice cream bar without getting any on their beards, swaying, belting out the refrain, and then, quickly, getting back to the game. They didn’t even play the whole song. In short, it looked like any other baseball sing-along. But the good will coming out of my TV that night was palpable.

The soundtrack of baseball includes an outside score as well as the rhythms created by the game itself, and musical touchstones like “Sweet Caroline” are fascinating. The opening lyrics (“Where it began/I can’t begin to knowing/But then I know it’s growing strong”) might as well be pulled from quotes from the fans in the Boston Globe article about why they sing the song—as far as they knew, Boston fans sing it because they’ve always sung it, despite the fact that the tradition was only a few years old when that article was written.

But the message from the Yankees as they blared their rival’s anthem at home that night was clear to anyone tuned in to the game. And in a situation like the one that week, where it was easy to feel useless and helpless, that simple musical gesture was very deeply felt. The music of baseball is a part of it that even I can appreciate.

Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, including “Glissandos and glissandon’ts” and “Wedding Music”. You can read more about Albert Von Tilzer, Jack Norworth, and popular music in Grove Music Online.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Image credit: young baseball player hitting the ball. © Tomwang112 via iStockphoto.

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Few composers embrace such a span of disciplines — musicological, philosophical, historical, political, philological — as Richard Wagner. To what extent does the wide-ranging, comprehensive nature of Wagner’s works militate against a true understanding of them? How close are we, in his bicentenary year, to an understanding that does them justice? The following illustrations from The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World demonstrate the variety of perspectives on Wagner, from outdated stereotypes to new reappraisals.

• Postcard showing the Red and White Lion

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner010tsb.jpg

  In which Wagner was born on 22 May 1813. Ironically the house was situated in the Jewish Quarter of the city. (Collection Tom Phillips)

• Christoph Marthaler’s Bayreuth production of Tristan und Isolde (2005)

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner1710enrico.jpg

  Emphasised the characters' chronic dysfunctionality, each occupying his or her own physical and emotional space. © Bayreuther Festpiele/Enrico Nawrath

• A postcard showing Tannhäuser’s face

   

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  Composed of the minstrel himself, Venus and her roseate attendants. (Collection Tom Phillips)

• Alberich’s theft of the gold (a scene from the Ring)

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner095tsb.jpg

  By Franz Heigel, 1865 – 66. © Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds, Munich

• Brünnhilde on her rock refuses to give up the ring

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner110atsb.jpg

  In spite of the pleading of her sister Valkyrie Waltraute. Drawing by Franz Stassen, c. 1910, © Private Collection, Munich

• The Ride of the Valkyries

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner110btsb.jpg

  By William T. Maud (1890). The trumpet is not authentic, but Wotan's two ravens, seen in the foreground, are.© Gavin Graham Gallery, London

• Wagner holds court at Wahnfried.

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner123tsb.jpg

  W. Beckmann's oil painting of 1882 imagines Cosima, Liszt and Wagner's disciple Hans von Wolzogen all appropriately enraptured by the Master's reading. © Richard Wagner Museum, Triebschen

• Portrait of Wagner

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner134tsb.jpg

  By Friedrich Pecht, a friend of the Paris years. The picture was painted c. 1864-65 for Ludwig II, whose bust is visible in the background, though a misunderstanding over the fee caused a political scandal. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• Viennese caricature

   

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  By Karl Klic (1873), turning the tables on Wagner and his anti-Semitism. © Ernst Kreowski and Eduard Fuchs, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur, Berlin, 1907

• One of a series of eight photographs of Wagner

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner139tsb.jpg

  Taken by the photographers Elliot & Fry on 24 May 1877, during his English visit that year. © Photo Elliot and Fry

• The sensual extravagance of the Magic Garden in Parsifal

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/agner158tsb.jpg

  As conceived by Paul von Joukowsky and executed by the Brückner brothers (1882), © Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn, Cologne

• ‘Frou-Frou Wagner’

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/wagner13184.jpg

  From Der Floh, 24 June 1877. Caricature depicting Wagner acquiring pink satin by the yard and being shafted by the journalist Daniel Spitzer, who published the letters to his milliner. © Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna

Barry Millington is chief music critic for the London Evening Standard and the editor of The Wagner Journal. He has written and edited, or co-edited, seven books on Wagner, including The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World (2013), The Wagner Compendium (1992), The Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (1993), and the New Grove Guide to Wagner and his Operas (2006). In addition to his writing, he has also acted as dramaturgical adviser to several international music festivals.

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By Hal Gladfelder

The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.

As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.

A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]

In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.

Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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To celebrate the release on this monumental album, Oxford Bibliographies has released an extensive bibliography on The Beatles with chapters on the early years of in Liverpool and Hamburg, Beatlemania, individual studies of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. In addition to the new bibliography article, Oxford Music Online has a comprehensive collection of articles on the fab four, with articles on each Beatles album. Each article talks about the history of the album, its creation and the impact it made on the music world. To celebrate Beatlemania, it’s now time for a quiz…

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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According to the Daily Mail, Oi! records were ‘evil’. According to the Socialist Worker, Oi! was a conduit for Nazism. According to the NME, Oi! was a means to inject ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes into popular music.

The year is 1981, and on 3 July the Harmbrough Tavern is set ablaze in the London borough of Southall. Trapped inside the pub are three bands aligned to the Oi! movement initiated the previous year from within the pages of the Sounds music weekly. Therein, by contrast, Oi! is defined as a form of ‘working-class protest’, a ‘loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Oi!, for most of those involved with it, was punk without the art school pretensions; a street-level music that sought to align working-class youth cults in the face of welfare cuts and growing unemployment. And there lay the rub. For Oi! comprised skinheads; and by 1981, skinheads were being recruited as foot-soldiers for the British far right, both the National Front and the British Movement. An Oi! gig in Southall, therefore, where a large Asian community had previously felt the brunt of cowardly racist attacks and witnessed the violent aftermath of an NF election rally in 1979, was a red-rag to a community fed up with being on the defensive and ready to respond. And respond the community most certainly did.

Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2. Source: “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” by Matthew Worley in Twentieth Century British History

The events of July 1981 have forever tainted Oi! Caught in the reductionist media snare, Oi! fell into an equation the broadly read: Oi! = skinheads = racism. In truth, however, Oi! was a rather more complex phenomenon. Though its lyrics and imagery tended to combine social resentment and patriotism in a way that provided a potential pathway to and from the far right, Oi! also contained a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was far more than a musical wing of the NF or BM. Indeed, many involved in Oi! actively (and literally) fought back against right-wing attempts to appropriate their music, a struggle that led eventually to the NF setting up its on ‘white power’ scene circa 1983. Rather, Oi!’s focus and lyrical preoccupations reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’ and formal political organisation. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

As this suggests, an analysis of the bands, audience and ephemera associated with Oi! reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments on-going within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption). Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity. This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’. In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

Oi! then was not a vehicle for ‘evil’, Nazism or any other sort of ‘ism’. Its protest was made in primarily class terms, with its working-class origins serving as a common denominator across those associated with it. True, politics – along with youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries – provided points of tension. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that sought for a political and cultural impact that looked beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union, Daily Mail and NME.

Matthew Worley is a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books and articles on British politics, and is currently writing a study of British youth culture and politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His article “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” is available free in Twentieth Century British History for a limited time.

Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century.

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Annette Funicello

The MMC premiered on 3 October 1955 on the ABC television network to coincide with the opening of Disneyland. MMC was Disney’s second venture in network television, the first being an anthology series, the short-lived Disneyland that later became Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.

MMC was essentially a variety show for children, complete with a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, musical numbers performed by the Mouseketeers, and talent and comedy segments. The show aired five days a week in the afternoons and each day of the week had a different theme:

• Monday: Fun with Music.
• Tuesday: Guest Star.
• Wednesday: Anything Can Happen.
• Thursday: Circus.
• Friday: Talent Round-up.

One unique feature of the show was the Mouseketeer Roll Call, in which many (but not all) of that day’s line-up of regular performers would introduce themselves rhythmically by name to the television audience. In the serials, teens faced challenges in everyday situations, often overcome by their common sense or through recourse to the advice of respected elders.

Cast

Originally, Disney wanted “ordinary” kids on the show, but his idea was abandoned as the audition process began for the show in March 1955. Thirty-nine children were hired to become “Mouseketeers,” with nine becoming the “Red Team” which consisted of Funicello, Tommy Cole, Darlene Gillespie, Bobby Burgess, Doreen Tracey, Cubby O’Brien, Karen Pendleton, Lonnie Burr, and Sharon Baird. Cheryl Holdridge joined the team during the second season.

MMC was hosted by Jimmie Dodd, a songwriter and the “Head Mouseketeer”, who provided leadership both on and off screen. In addition to his other contributions, he often provided short segments encouraging young viewers to make the right moral choices. These little homilies became known as “Doddisms”.

Dodd composed and performed much of the music for the show, including the “Mickey Mouse March” that opened the show, as well as the slow “alma mater” version that closed each episode.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Roy Williams, a staff artist at Disney, also appeared in the show as the “Big Mouseketeer”. It was Williams who suggested that all characters on the show wear the Mickey Mouse ears (“Mouseke-ears”), which he helped create.

Annette Funicello

The “Mouseketeers” performed in a variety of musical and dance numbers on the show as well as some informational segments, but it was Annette Funicello who was Walt Disney’s favorite. Born on 22 October 1942 in Utica, New York, the family had moved to California when she was still young. Disney himself saw her performing the lead role in “Swan Lake” at her ballet school’s year-end recital in Burbank and decided to have her audition along with two hundred other children. Annette became the last Mouseketeer of the twenty-four that was picked.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Annette was the only Mouseketeer that Disney kept under exclusive contract. He personally managed aspects of her career, and created one of the show’s serials especially for her, a serial called “Annette.” Disney had plans for a film career for her and fashioned the serial to see if she was ready for film. The other popular serials on MMC, such as “The Adventures of Spin and Marty,” “Adventure in Dairyland,” and the “Hardy Boys Mysteries,” gave way to “Annette” which aired during the third season of the MMC and was the last serial broadcast on the show.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through Disney’s supervision, Annette appeared on other TV shows, notably, Danny Thomas’ Make Room for Daddy in 1958. Disney also featured her in several of his own productions like the TV series Zorro, and the films The Shaggy Dog and Babes in Toyland.

In the 1960s, Funicello went on to co-star with Frankie Avalon in many Bikini Beach movies through the American International studios. Disney gave his permission for her to appear in these movies as long as she wore a bathing suit that didn’t show her navel. She also made some popular records, notably the hit “Tall Paul” in 1959.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the 1980s, she became the celebrity spokesperson for Skippy Peanut Butter, appearing on many TV commercials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A MMC “Reunion Special” aired on NBC in 1980:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The original MMC aired from 1955 until it was cancelled in 1959. Other versions of the show aired later, like The New Mickey Mouse Club (1977-79), The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989-1996) and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006 and current).

Dodd died in 1964 of cancer in Hawaii. Funicello died on 8 April 2013 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.

Now it’s time to say goodbye….
Why? Because we LIKE YOU!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

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Image Credit: Photographs provided by author.

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One of Mozart’s most enduringly popular operas, The Magic Flute has captivated audiences since its premiere in Vienna in 1791. Centered on the struggles of the heroic Prince Tamino, his beloved Pamina, and the wise Sarastro (with help and comic relief from the birdcatcher Papageno) against the Queen of the Night, we know The Magic Flute as a classic tale of the battle between good and evil, or perhaps between enlightenment and ignorance.

Mozart’s Autograph Manuscript of The Magic Flute

But it hasn’t always been that way. Depending on who we ask, and when we ask them, The Magic Flute might be a very different work. In might not involve the same characters, or it might be about a clichéd love triangle. Some of the music might be taken from other Mozart operas, or some of it might not even be by Mozart at all. We tend to assume that audiences in the past saw the “classic” operas just as we see them today, but for many years that was the exception rather than the rule. So how did we get from there to where we are now?

Schikanader in the role of Papageno. This image is from the front page of the original published libretto for the opera.

At that time, it was common to heavily adapt theatrical works to conform to their own dramatic standards, remaking older works into forms that audiences would easily understand and appreciate. As hard to imagine as it might be today, in an age when most theaters go out of their way to be as faithful as possible to the music and text of “classical” works, that tendency extended to Mozart’s works, including The Magic Flute. In fact, it actually wasn’t until the early 20th century, over a century after it was written, that The Magic Flute appeared in anything like its original version in Paris.

The first attempt to bring this work to Parisian audiences was in 1801, a decade after it was composed. Appreciation for Mozart’s music, and for Viennese classicism in general, was on the rise in France, and it seemed an opportune moment to begin exposing French audiences to his theatrical music. The many memorable tunes of The Magic Flute made it an ideal choice, but the plot, by Emanuel Schikaneder—who also owned the theater and played the first Papageno—was a bit more esoteric than the standard fare.

And so Les Mystères d’Isis (“The Mysteries of Isis”) was born. The original text was scrapped, although the new story did borrow a few characters and general concepts. Musically the adapters applied a lighter pen to the work; the point was bringing Mozart’s music to Paris, after all. Still, some music was cut, and some from Mozart’s other operas—still unknown in France at the time—was added in. Even odder, the work also contains some music by Haydn, another master of the Viennese classical tradition.

Title page of Les Mystères d’Isis.

Les Mystères was a modest hit, if not quite a blockbuster, and it was occasionally repeated until 1827. Over the next few decades the French mostly lost interest in The Magic Flute, preferring instead to hear adapted French (and occasionally Italian) versions of Mozart’s other operas, especially Don Giovanni, which was a Parisian favorite for most of the nineteenth century.

It wasn’t until 1865 that The Magic Flute reappeared (now called La Flûte enchantée), in a new version commissioned by the director Léon Carvalho, who was renowned as a “faithful and devoted restorer” of eighteenth-century operas, in one critic’s words. And, true enough, Mozart’s music was treated with obvious respect here—the composer was just too famous by the 1860s for any director to do otherwise. The extra music found in Les Mystères disappeared and the cuts to the score were restored.

Title page of the 1865 French version of The Magic Flute (piano/vocal score). Note that the name of the original librettist (Emanuel Schikaneder) is never mentioned, but the French translators are.

Yet the opera’s text was another matter entirely. Schikaneder’s name was nowhere to be found on the published title page (above), and the plot still had much more in common with nineteenth-century French operas than with his original text. The central drama was a love triangle between Tamino, now a humble fisherman/musician; Pamina, recast as the beautiful and chaste girl next door; and the seductive and magical Queen of the Night. (Echoes of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser are almost certainly intentional…)

Critics and audiences were wowed by this new translation. People unfamiliar with Schikaneder’s text assumed it was “authentic,” and those in the know claimed this “translation” was much better than the original, anyway. This version appeared again in 1875 again to great acclaim, but a third production in 1893 prompted more questions than cheers.

By the 1890s, a number of critics—including many of the most famous composers of the day, like Fauré, Dukas, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy—were calling loudly for more historically informed versions of earlier operas, including Mozart’s. Eventually they found a theater director who was clever or crazy enough to follow their suggestions: Albert Carré.

A front-page picture of Edmond Clément as Tamino in the 1909 Magic Flute production, taken from the French magazine Musica.

In 1909 Carré commissioned a new and highly publicized French translation of The Magic Flute that would bring the work as close as possible to the German original. And he more or less got what he asked for, which was both good and bad for his production. While those in favor of historically informed performances were thrilled, others were much less so. Some of the latter group were genuinely fond of the older version, and others found the original plot to be either ridiculous or simply unintelligible.

But as skeptical as some critics and listeners were about the “faithful” 1909 version, they mostly realized that historically informed performances of Mozart’s operas would soon become the new standard. In just over a century, audiences approached “classic” operas in a totally different way. Before, they had adapted older operas to their tastes; now they had learned to adapt themselves to these older works.

William Gibbons is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Texas Christian University. This blog post is derived from his recent Opera Quarterly article, “(De)Translating Mozart: The Magic Flute in 1909 Paris.” His book on this general topic, Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-siècle Paris, is forthcoming in June 2013.

Since its inception in 1983, The Opera Quarterly has earned the enthusiastic praise of opera lovers and scholars alike for its engagement within the field of opera studies. In 2005, David J. Levin, a dramaturg at various opera houses and critical theorist at the University of Chicago, assumed the executive editorship of The Opera Quarterly, with the goal of extending the journal’s reputation as a rigorous forum for all aspects of opera and operatic production.

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Image credit: all images courtesy of William Gibbons.

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Every year, around mid-April, music lovers await the news that the BBC proms schedule has been announced. We look forward to the old favourites, the new commissions, the excited atmosphere, and some of the best performers in the world. When summer arrives, scores of people—young and old alike—travel to London to visit the Royal Albert Hall and be part of this great British tradition.

Since 1895 the Proms have been running once a year with around 70 concerts per season. One of the great aspects of the Proms is the perfect juxtaposition of old and new repertoire; you could go to a baroque vocal recital, followed by a Wagner opera, and then end with some jazz. This is the magic of the Proms; it is this variety that keeps a loyal audience returning year after year.

As always, a selection of Oxford University Press titles will be performed, and the pieces selected are a microcosm of the Proms calendar as a whole. Prom 16 will include William Walton’s Death of Falstaff and Touch her soft lips, and part from his Henry V suite while excerpts from his Battle of Britain suite will be performed at Prom 65, the ‘Film Music Prom’.

By contrast, there is Gerald Barry’s No other people in the late night Prom 50. Originally performed in 2009 in Dublin, this will be its UK premiere, a contemporary work for a twenty-first century audience.

At this quintessentially British festival, Vaughan Williams is always a popular choice. Prom 71 includes the premiere of a new arrangement by Anthony Payne of Vaughan Williams’ Four Last Songs, a BBC commission, breathing new life into already established repertoire. The Last Night of the Proms, one of the most exciting evenings in classical music, will feature Nigel Kennedy playing the sublime Lark Ascending, arguably one of the most loved pieces of repertoire in Britain.

To get you in the mood, here’s a playlist of some of the pieces that we’re looking forward to hearing:

Lucy Allen is the Print and Web Marketing Assistant in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press.

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Joining a choir is all the rage and some say that choir memberships are getting younger. It’s like knitting and bingo — it’s cool to sing in a choir. Not in the choirs around here, not yet!

Every English choral society has its stalwarts; ladies (sadly mostly ladies — there are never enough men) who run the committee, enjoy a frisson with the young(ish) conductor, share lifts, and find friendship. Some have very fine voices indeed. Some find it harder nowadays to control their vibrato. All give a lot and get a lot back.

Twice or three times a year, regular as clockwork, the choir employs local musicians to form their orchestra. The singers have rehearsed the notes accompanied by their faithful pianist for months. Then, at around 7:20 on the Wednesday before the concert, the final rehearsal, an assorted bunch of local instrumentalists pitch up and, for the first time, the choir becomes part of the work performed as the composer intended. The impact of those opening few bars makes all the hurried dinners, the trips out in the wind and wet, the missed glasses of wine worthwhile.

Photo courtesy of Woodstock Music Society

I’m a clarinettist and I’ve been doing these gigs for years. The orchestra is picked from a small pool of local players — an even smaller pool of wind players. We turn up to the same faces sitting in the same places time after time. We only ever meet up in school halls and churches, but there’s a warmth and comfortable understanding grown out of a common purpose. It’s like slipping on a comfortable pair of slippers; everyone knows the etiquette, what’s expected of them, how it goes. We know that there’s only one toilet and that it’s a better bet to slip out to the pub next door to avoid the queue. We know to wear two t-shirts, a jumper, and a fleece under our coats because St Andrew’s in February is the coldest church in Oxfordshire. We know that we’ll get a welcome cup of tea at half-time and if there’ll be biscuits. And we know to set out from home ridiculously early on concert night so we’re sure to be in our places at least 15 minutes before the downbeat. No point giving our colleagues extra worry lines or risking the conductor’s angry stare.

After a few years of turning up on time and playing respectably you’re part of the gang and the ladies sitting in the front row of the choir just behind you know your name and include you in their chat. The back row of the winds has a special function — sopranos unknowingly rest their vocal scores on your heads as their arms sink with the weight of a chunky Mozart Requiem. Those sitting immediately behind have a good enough sight-line to be able to follow the clarinet and bassoon parts note by note and they will whisper encouragement and maybe the occasional compliment after a successfully-negotiated solo.

Why do we do it? It’s not for the money. There are longeurs a-plenty (so you don’t forget to take your phone and the latest Private Eye to rehearsals), but when a performance goes better than you ever thought it could, and it often does, being a small part of something so big and beautiful is a high which isn’t often to be had. I hope the ladies in the front row feel the same.

Barbara Stuart is Marketing Manager for printed music at OUP and a busy amateur clarinettist.

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As I celebrate the late Dusty Springfield’s 74th birthday on the 16th of April, I am struck by the number of singers who choose to perform as Dusty—complete with wigs, costumes, and the trademark hand gestures—rather than singing Dusty’s hit songs as themselves. It’s no surprise that ambitious and confident singers want to sing Dusty’s hits; many of the songs, like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and “The Look of Love,” are not only beautifully crafted, they’re vocally challenging. Assuming that she can meet the steep vocal challenges, the singer is well rewarded for her efforts: these songs are proven crowd favorites, guaranteed to elicit passionate applause, if not standing ovations for those brave enough to try singing them. For these reasons, most serious female pop singers know, and even closely study, the Dusty canon of classic recordings from the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them take it a step farther and, in addition to interpreting the songs as Dusty would, they want to look and act like Dusty as well.

The most recent singer to take a crack at “doing Dusty” is Kirsten Holly Smith in her now-playing off-Broadway show, Forever Dusty. Smith is one in a long line of excellent singers (and some, not so great, let’s be frank) who have attempted to portray the now legendary life and sound of 1960s White Queen of Soul, Dusty Springfield. Others include Suzanne Fletcher, Tamsin Carroll, Sheena Crouch, Karen Noble, Wendy Stapleton, Emma Wilkinson, Katy Setterfield, and drag performers like Lori Le Verne and Jayne County.

Dusty Springfield in het Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. 8 March 1968. Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Rijksfotoarchief. Creative Commons License.

Each of these performers is to be admired not only for trying to scale the Mount Everest of female pop singing, but for subjecting themselves to the often withering critique of Dusty fans who insist that no one ever has, or ever will sound like Dusty. As the singers soon learn, after the final chords have faded and audience endorphin levels have returned to normal, some serious grumbling begins: “Poor thing, her singing’s not half bad but she’s nothing like our Dusty.” Consult any website or blog devoted to Dusty fandom (my favorite site is Let’s Talk Dusty) and you will see such reactions, largely negative, in response to the latest attempt to portray Dusty Springfield’s sound, look, and presence onstage.

Fan critique has not only been reactive, but proactive, in response to rumored film portrayals that have not yet even taken place. Again, go to any of the Dusty fansites and you will find discussion threads—some dating back many years—concerning Variety’s latest article on a much hoped-for but also much dreaded film biography of Dusty Springfield. Fans, generally, want a biopic to be made but one that celebrates Dusty’s stardom and not one that dwells on her often unhappy personal life. They fear that a narrative fig leaf or two will soon be stripped away by Hollywood or London’s prurient gaze.

Indeed, as rumors continue to fly about a Dusty Springfield biopic à la the award winning Ray Charles film, Ray, Patsy Cline’s Sweet Dreams, or Kevin Spacey’s homage to Bobby Darin, Beyond the Sea, the burning question is: Who should play Dusty? Given Dusty’s musical, theatrical, and personal complexities, perhaps the question should be Who can play Dusty?

Annie J. Randall is Associate Professor of Musicology at Bucknell University. She is the author of Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods. The coauthor of Puccini and ‘The Girl’: History and Reception of Girl of the Golden West and editor of Music, Power, and Politics, she is Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Popular Music-US branch and Co-Editor of the Music/Culture Series of Wesleyan University Press.

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After the success of the single “Please Please Me” and the release of the album Please Please Me, British fans and the press eagerly anticipated “From Me to You.” Fans had pre-ordered so many copies of the disk that when Parlophone did release R 5015 on 11 April 1963, the single immediately appeared in pop charts where it would stay for an amazing 21 weeks. In the sometimes-volatile New Musical Express charts, “From Me to You” charged into the ratings almost immediately, displacing Gerry and the Pacemakers and their version of “How Do You Do It” from the top position in the 26 April issue. But British journalists found challenges in describing the music and the artists.

The music press knew this disc would be a success, as indeed would every Beatles release until 1967. This success presented many critics with a significant problem: what of any consequence could they say about a Beatles record? Fans were going to buy the records no matter what they said. More problematically, the Beatles represented music that British music critics had difficulty understanding. The industry had disdained rock and roll in favor of smoother artists, for example transforming Cliff Richard from a snarling, Elvis-imitating rocker singing “Move It” into the harmless film star of Summer Holiday (January 1963). But the Beatles represented something different and writers seemed to lack a vocabulary for what they heard on these recordings and in concert halls, let alone what was transpiring in the minds of teens listening to these discs at home.

Record Retailer and Music Industry News, in a prophetic bit of hyperbole, noted (11 April) that “Beatle hysteria has never been higher—and this is a likely Number One.” Keith Fordyce, in The New Musical Express (12 April), commented that the disc possessed “plenty of sparkle” and a “commercial” lyric, and would entering the charts “quickly.” Nevertheless, despite approving the singing, the harmonizing, and the lyric, he did not “rate the tune as being anything like as good as on the last two discs” [“Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me”]. And Don Nicholl in Disk (13 April) applauded “From Me to You” as a “lusty beater” destined to be a hit, and notes that the harmonica, guitar, and singing would send the recording to the top of the charts. Notably, Nicholl remarked on the “surprising falsetto phrases” in the song, presumably referring to the insertion of the syllable “whoo” at the end of the chorus that the Beatles had copied from the Isley Brothers. Every time they sang the syllable in their performances of “Twist and Shout” and shook their heads, their audiences screamed. John Lennon and Paul McCartney knew a good thing when they heard it and copy it they did. Critics knew that what they heard was a hit, but were unsure what it meant.

Record Retailer was right about the hysteria and by now the band was touring constantly while continuing their juggernaut of near daily appearances on radio and television shows, including a third appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars to promote the record. Having taped this show on Easter Sunday (14 April) in Teddington and finding themselves on the south side of the Thames, they took the opportunity to hear a band that impresario Georgio Gomelsky had recommended to Brian Epstein. When they entered the “Crawdaddy Club” (a room rented by Gomelsky) they encountered a band that he unofficially managed: the Rolling Stones. The Stones certainly knew who the Beatles were and the Beatles were impressed with what they heard, inviting the London band to be their guests when they appeared at the Royal Albert Hall later the same week. After that show, as some of the Stones helped Mal Evans load the Beatles van, a group of shrieking girls surrounded them, thinking they were the soon-to-be Fab Four. Although the girls were disappointed, Brian Jones of the Stones knew immediately what he wanted.

On Sunday 21 April, the New Musical Express held their annual “Poll-Winners All-Star Concert” which featured the performers who had gathered the most points in categories such as “Best Male Vocalist” and “Best Instrumental Group.” Recognizing (or perhaps fearing) a sea change in British pop music, the NME added four acts that had not been on the ballot to a program that featured perennial winners Cliff Richard and the Shadows. The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Mark Wynter, and Mike Berry joined the roster of acts; but everyone knew who stole the show. A sea change was growing into a tidal wave.

Gordon R. Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music here.

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(1) Be aware that people with autism can usually understand more than they can express.

Autism doesn’t change the fact that everyone understands more than they can express. When we learn a new language, we can understand what someone is saying long before we can create sentences that demonstrate the depth of our knowledge. Babies can understand a great deal of language before they begin to speak their first words.

People with autism often communicate differently to express what they know and want to share. Some will write thoughts on paper, or draw a picture demonstrating intent. They may use sign language, or a stack of picture cards to convey wants and needs. Many people with autism use shorter sentences with simplified language. This does not mean they are not thinking and comprehending full sentences with higher-level vocabulary. Being willing to communicate in a different way will allow you to be aware that communication comes in many forms. Autism Community provides resources and strategies to assist with communication and children with autism.

(2) Be aware that people with autism can be sensitive.

We learn our senses in first or second grade and can name ‘the five senses’ as tasting, touching, hearing, smelling, and seeing. In addition, we have two other senses that can let us know whether we are upside down or right side up and whether we are being squeezed or free to move. Almost all persons with autism have sensitivities that include one or more of these seven areas. In fact, most people in general have sensitivities in these areas as well. The difference is in the severity of the sensitivities. Some people with autism are hypersensitive to some of these areas and some are hyposensitive to some areas. Every person with autism is different; in fact, every person is different (whether they have autism or not)!

When near someone with autism, pay close attention to the way she reacts to sounds and lights, or how close she wants to stand to others. An awareness of these sensitivities can make a big difference in the way a person with autism engages in social events and activities. The Sensory World of Autism shows the sensory perspective of children with autism spectrum disorder that also struggle with sensory challenges.

(3) Be aware that people with autism think differently.

Someone who has autism often thinks differently. Different is not better or less than — it is just different. Someone with autism may need a longer period of time to process a question or statement. It is also common for a person with autism to think visually (or in pictures) and to be able to express thoughts easier using visual cues or images. An awareness of cognitive differences can go a long way toward being aware of the individual personhood of those with autism.

(4) Be aware that people with autism probably have a specific interest or topic that may help with communication.

Many of us have a specific area of interest that we enjoy discussing. Persons with autism often have an area of interest as well. It can be difficult for someone with autism to stop talking about or communicating this interest; therefore, it can be a great way to get to know someone by asking about this topic.

This awareness can be a terrific ‘ice breaker’ or a way to deepen a relationship with someone who has autism. The Indiana Resource Center for Autism at Indiana University offers unique strategies for parents and teachers in regarding to teaching and motivating children with autism.

(5) Be aware that people with autism tend to focus on the trees rather than the forest.

It can be difficult for someone with autism to think critically without focusing on minute details. If the discussion is about clothing, it may be necessary for the person with autism to discuss the stitching style used by the designer or seamstress. This often leads to the area of interest a person with autism may have, and is part of the cognitive patterning unique, yet familiar, to him. Be aware that the repetition or consistent use of minutiae rather than broad thinking is part of cognitive processing for a person with autism.

(6) Be aware that a child (or adult) with autism may be having a moment in public that seems confusing to you.

Because of sensory, cognitive, communication, and social differences, people with autism (and/or their family members) may sometimes have moments in public that can appear to be very different than they are. Because some people do not understand the differences and challenges that surround a family living with autism, they sometimes offer comments they feel may be helpful, or worse, judging glances and verbal recriminations to a family already in the middle of a negative moment or meltdown.

Being aware of the frustrations and challenges inherent within a family, and remembering to walk a mile in their shoes before coming to a conclusion, can be an excellent start in developing an awareness of autism. Moreover, what family doesn’t have its moments?

(7) Be aware that people with autism may need help with social circumstances.

Social situations can be beyond awkward for someone who has autism. The combination of sensitivities, communication differences, and expectations others have can be overwhelming. Having a friend to help guide a person with autism through the event, or a set of cards with conversation starters, etc. can be very helpful.

Be aware of the possible confusion and uncomfortable feelings someone with autism can have when placed in a social situation. Planning ahead with the needs of the person in mind can lead to a successful and less stressful social encounter. Social stories can be used to help facilitate positive, appropriate social skills.

(8) Be aware that a family that includes a person with autism may be tired and stressed.

It can be exhausting to be part of a family that includes one or more persons with autism. The daily challenges can mount and become overwhelming. Knowing that families who have members with autism (or other challenges) are often under a great deal of stress is a first step toward an empathic view. Families may honestly be too tired to set up play dates, go out to eat, or meet at the park, because the planning and implementation of these seemingly ordinary events can be overshadowed by the demands of daily life (cognition, communication, sensitivities, social challenges).

Awareness of and compassion for the needs of a family is sometimes demonstrated by planning events that take the needs of the entire family into consideration, or even, letting a family ‘off the hook’ knowing they may be exhausted from the demands of their daily lives. Support groups such as the Autism Society of America and Autism Speaks can help families connect with other families to share their stories and obtain services.

(9) Be aware that a child with autism may have siblings that get less attention than they do.

Siblings of those with autism may sometimes feel ignored or set aside because the needs of a brother or sister with autism overshadow the needs of the sibling at times. Developing an awareness of the specific feelings a sibling may have, and responding to that sibling in a way that conveys understanding can make a big difference in the life of that child or adult. Sibshops is a national organization that assists and provides programming for siblings of children with disabilities.

(10) Be aware that a person with autism is a person and not a label.

Autism is a label. Cans, cars, clothing, and technology have labels. People are not labels. A person with autism is a person. Be aware at all times that labels define and limit — real understanding comes with knowing the individual and responding to her needs.

Alice M. Hammel and Ryan M. Hourigan are the authors of Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs: A Label-Free Approach and the forthcoming Teaching Music to Students with Autism. Alice Hammel teaches for James Madison and Virginia Commonwealth Universities, and has years of experience teaching instrumental and choral music. Ryan Hourigan is Assistant Professor of Music Education at Ball State University and a recipient of the Outstanding University Music Educator Award from the Indiana Music Educators Association. The companion website to Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs provides more resources.

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Image credit: (1) via iStockphoto. (2) Having fun in a music class. Photo by SolStock, iStockphoto.

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For Black History Month, I wrote about an American Television pioneer: Nat “King” Cole, who was the first African American to host a television show. Since many have dubbed March as “National Women’s Month,” I focus on another pioneer of early television, Dinah Shore.

American television of the 1950s was a haven for white male artists and hosts. African Americans were scarce on TV, appearing only as guest artists on musical variety shows. Women television artists fared no better. Of the many female singers active at the time (Lena Horne, Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland, and numerous others), the only woman singer to host her own TV show was Dinah Shore.

Frances “Fanny” Rose Shore was born on 29 February 1916, in Winchester, Tennessee. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she moved to New York City to pursue a singing career. Her first job was as a singer at WNEW, a radio station in New York, where she sang with Frank Sinatra who was hired around the same time. During one show, she sang “Dinah,” and a DJ who couldn’t remember her name called her the “Dinah girl.” The name stuck, and she used it for the rest of her life. She sang and recorded with Xavier Cugat’s band, and recorded her first big solo hit, “Yes, My Darling Daughter” in 1941.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With her radio and recording successes, she was signed to host her own radio show, “Call to Music” in 1943. That same year she appeared in her first movie, “Thank Your Lucky Stars” starring Eddie Cantor. She became immensely popular, touring to entertain US troops during World War II and recording several hit records. Shore also appeared in musical films throughout the 1940s, including Belle of the Yukon (1944) and Till the Clouds Roll By (1946).

Like many radio stars, Dinah Shore made the move to television. In 1951, she made her television debut on The Ed Wynn Show, and also made a guest appearance on Bob Hope’s first NBC television special. These appearances resulted in NBC assigning her own regular TV show, The Dinah Shore Show in November 1951. Like many programs at the time, the show was given two 15-minute time slots during the week. In 1956, Chevrolet sponsored Dinah to host two one-hour specials, and their success led to Dinah Shore’s Chevy Show, a regular musical variety show that ran from 1956 until 1961, running in a Sunday evening time slot on NBC.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shore’s success on the show can be attributed to her conservative vocal choices and middlebrow sensibilities. She, like many TV stars of the decade, was content to sing “standards” and “Tin Pan Alley” songs that were familiar to the TV audience. In particular, she was noted for her famed signature theme song, the catchy Chevrolet jingle, “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” accompanied by her closing gesture of a sweeping smooch to the audience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The song was helped by the fact that its sponsor was an “all American” car, and the lyric: “America’s the greatest land of all,” also affirmed the conservative TV audience’s sensibilities. After the Chevy Show, Shore went on host three daytime television programs: Dinah’s Place (1970 to 1974), the 90-minute talk show Dinah! (1974 to 1980), and Dinah and Friends (1979 to 1984).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her TV career ended in 1991 after a two-year run on cable TV’s The Nashville Network with the talk show, A Conversation with Dinah.

Dinah Shore achieved much success in her television career, winning the Emmy Awards for Best Female Singer (1954-55), Best Female Personality (1956-57), and Best Actress in a Musical or Variety Series (1959). However, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show rarely entered the top 20 ratings during its run, as it ran against CBS’s General Electric Theater hosted by Ronald Reagan, which regularly won the time slot (Reagan also had a better lead-in with The Ed Sullivan Show).

Besides TV, Dinah Shore was an avid golfer, and supporter of women’s golf. She founded the Colgate (and now Nabisco) Dinah Shore Tournament on the LPGA tour. Dinah Shore passed away on 24 February 1994 in Beverly Hills, California, after a brief battle with ovarian cancer.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

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At the age of sixteen I was told that I would no longer be able to play my beloved trumpet, due to medical complications. The only alternative, to uphold my county scholarship and commitments to orchestras and brass bands, was to take up the tuba. The arrogant trumpeter that I was back then was horrified at this cumbersome instrument, cuddling a great lump of brass that seemed to prove no merit to my sense of style or popularity. At the time, being a grumpy adolescent, this was torture.

Years on, I take pride in my position as a tuba player. My beautiful Besson Sovereign tuba is affectionately named Tallulah or Tula for short. I have learned what a delightful instrument the tuba is and how versatile and lyrical they can be when played (even if they are a little heavy). There seems to be a stigma that the tuba’s only vocation is as an instrument of the “ump-pah-pah” and counting endless bars of rests. However, more needs to be said of this sometimes under-rated instrument.

Unlike many string and woodwind instruments, the tuba has limited devoted repertoire. What is available varies in its purpose, some look to parody the instrument as the piece “Tuba Smarties” by Herbie Flowers does. Yet there are odd concertos that present the instrument in its splendour, as the Vaughan Williams’s Concerto for Bass Tuba does. Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1953 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the orchestra, Vaughan Williams’s tuba concerto remains today an outstanding work for the instrument and is recognised as the first major work written for the tuba. Indeed, when it was premiered on 13 June 1954, performed by the orchestra’s principal tuba player Philip Catelinet, it was the first time that a concerto of its kind had ever been performed.

It is through the Vaughan Williams concerto that we are able to recognise the great range of the tuba and appreciate its hidden talents. While it cannot be denied that it serves the purpose of a supporting bass in orchestras and brass bands very well, it is also capable of sweeping cadenzas (when given the opportunity) and in a lead role, such as it features in this concerto, it is evident how charismatic it can be. A particular favourite movement of mine is the second, the Romanza. It is easy to presume with its size that the tuba is quite an awkward instrument, yet in this movement the real sensitivity and tenderness of the tuba is heard.

For the meantime, I continue to practise my part from the arrangement for tuba and piano; perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to play the piece with an orchestra.

Ruth Fielder is the Sales Administrator in the Sheet Music Department at Oxford University Press.

Ralph Vaughan Williams‘s wide-ranging musical activities greatly enhanced English musical life but they have also contributed to the mistaken view that his compositional work was in some way parochial. He believed in the value of music education and wrote practical competition pieces, serviceable church music, and with the 49th Parallel he found a new outlet in writing for film. His profoundly disturbing Symphony No.6 received international acclaim with more than a hundred performances in a little over two years. The Concerto for Bass Tuba and Orchestra was composed in 1953-4 to mark the 50th anniversary of the formation of the LSO and was written for the orchestra’s principal tuba player, Philip Catelinet. It was the first major concerto to be written for the instrument, and remains today the outstanding work of its kind.

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Image credit: A gold brass tuba euphonium isolated against a white background in the vertical format. Photo by mkm3, iStockphoto.

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