Joel Chadabe, Electronic Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Uppersaddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997).
The historical description of electronic music begins with Jean Baptiste de La Borde's Clavin Electroniqúe! Then it jumps to the beginning of the twentieth century. I just have to wonder if there was anything noticeable in the nineteenth century.
The book includes nice photographs from old-time experience, and many composers' comments and writings are quoted. Most of them are quotes from interview conducted by the author. They give convincing reasoning for many ideas discussed in the book.
On the other hand, the interviews are mostly with recent composers and musicians; some of them may be replaced by more historically significant documents. This is especially true for discussions on Theremin, for example. Instead of using Thremin's contemporary documents, Chadabe quotes Mood, the famous synthesizer builder.
This is just a minor problem, however. For discussion of the electronic music history in the '50s on, the quotations work well in Chadabe's historical narrative.
Wen-chung, Chou, "Asian Music and Western Composition," in Dictionary of Contemporary Music, ed. by John Vinton (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 22-29.
This is a very informative article, but it has too much information in one paragraph. This confuses me sometime. An example can be seen in a paragraph on Stravinsky and Bartok (p. 22, right-hand side column). Actually, he does not discuss Bartok at all in one paragraph, different from the topic sentence. I would begin that paragraph as this: "The source of Stravinsky's Asian influence cannot be satisfactorily as certained."
Sorry. Not in this site.
Henry Dutilleux is one of the most prominent French composers in the twentieth century. He does not compose a lot, but each piece is well-thought and elaborated. His music display solid compositional technique and gives convincing musical expression supported by the technique.
This Potter book is the first English-language book on Dutilleux (I know of two books in French; my friend was writing a Master Thesis in a Japanese university by using these books). This is a bit surprising for me. Is nobody in the U. S. interested in his music?
Anyway, Potter uses much information taken from the interviews that she conducted. The information is indispensable and vitally used throughout the book, not only to the biographical accounts but also to the discussion of Dutillex's compositions.
Her analysis section in this book, probably written as a doctoral dissertation originally, is very straight forward and somewhat technical. One may need scores at hand.
I like the chapter titled "Dutilleux and the contemporary musical world," because it has a more critical view of the composer in a broader context, if not a historical context. Dutilleux was an independent composer and does not belong to any "school." That is probably why he has not been known to the outside of France. Critics/musicologists tends to have certain group of people or one big "key word" to make a historical narrative so that their story can be somehow generic. There are many composer, I assume, who do not belong to the historical currents, even thought they are writing absolutely wonderful music.
Sorry. Not in this site.
The discussion of The Oriental Music (Chapter VI) starts with Cowell's biographical information that includes his experiences with Asian music cultures. However, at the middle of the discussion, the author shifts the subject to the orientalism found in other composers, including European composers such as Messiaen and Britten. This chapter suddenly ends at the middle of discussion (European music's orientalism) and does not have any summary.
Such an organization seems unusual for a formal writing, I guess.
Probably, I would begin the chapter with a more general issue of
orientalism (maybe from impressionists' treatment of orientalism;
maybe from American "impressionist," Charles Tomlinson Griffes).
Then, I would start talking about Cowell's biographical accounts.
Sentences may be more refined and focused.
Sorry. Not in this site!
Saturday 28 February 1998.
Michael Griffel, "The Sonata Design in Chipin's Ballades," Current Musicology 36 (1983): 125-136.
Musicologist argues that some of Liszt's tone poems follws the sonata form. It may not be, then, suprising that this authour claimes that Chipin wrote four Ballades by following the sonata form. The problem, however, is how much one can be so certain about that theory. Do we have to ignore that the composer's contemporaries did not think that Ballades were written in a sonata form but in a free form?
Griffel emphasises that Ballades are written not just in quasi sonata form, but in the actual sonata form. He tries to prove his theory by putting every Ballade into a sonata mold he establish on page 127.
The more he discusses each Ballad in detail, the more the reader finds deviation from the sonata form in the Ballad, and the more I have to think that a Ballad would be written in quasi sonata from, rather than in the actual sonata form.
Griffel should have included musical example with which he could support himself more strongly.