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Biography chooses us when there is alchemy between biographer and subject—a perfect fit of interlocking puzzle pieces. In my case, a lifelong fascination with objects and the craftsmen who make them led me to the story of a pioneering violinmaker—American Luthier: Carleen Hutchins—the Art and Science of the Violin.

The post Fiddle parts and sound: how objects tell stories appeared first on OUPblog.

You might associate the recorder with memories of a second grade classroom and sounds vaguely resembling the tune of “Three Blind Mice” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” While the recorder has become a popular instrument in music education, it also has an extensive and interesting history.

The post 10 facts about the recorder appeared first on OUPblog.

Every summer since 1895, the Henry Wood Promenade Concert (commonly known as the BBC Proms) presents an eight-week orchestral classical music festival at the Royal Albert Hall in central London. This year’s Proms put a special focus on cellos.

The post 10 interesting facts about the cello appeared first on OUPblog.

It is a commonplace to say that, in Renaissance England, music was everywhere. Yet, however true the statement is, it obscures the fact that music existed in many different forms, with very different functions and very different meanings.

The post Musical literacy in Shakespeare’s England appeared first on OUPblog.

It is a commonplace to say that, in Renaissance England, music was everywhere. Yet, however true the statement is, it obscures the fact that music existed in many different forms, with very different functions and very different meanings.

The post Musical literacy in Shakespeare’s England appeared first on OUPblog.

Music is a human construct. What is acknowledged as ‘music’ varies between cultures, groups, and individuals. The Igbo of Nigeria have no specific term for music: the term nkwa denotes ‘singing, playing instruments and dancing’.

The post Music and what it means to be human appeared first on OUPblog.

This March, we’ve been focusing on the flute and its history and importance in the music scene. Resident OUP history editor Nancy Toff is also active in the flute world, as a performer, researcher and instructor. In order to delve into Nancy’s wealth of knowledge about the flute, we asked Meera Gudipati, currently attending the Yale School of Music as a Master of Music, to interview her about flute performance, music history, and other favorite flutists.

The post The evolution of flute sound and style appeared first on OUPblog.

This month’s spotlight instrument is particularly important to me; I played the flute for ten years as an adolescent and continue to have a soft spot for it. From long practices at high school band camp to dressy solo performances at the Colburn School where I studied on weekends, the flute was a dear and constant companion. Here are a few reasons I’ll always prefer it.

The post 10 reasons to love the flute appeared first on OUPblog.

Although there are several different bell-shaped brass instruments, from trumpets to tubas, it’s the French horn that people are talking about when they mention “the horn”. Known for its deep yet high-ranging sound, the French horn is an indispensable part of any orchestra or concert band.

The post Ten facts about the French horn appeared first on OUPblog.

What has history got to do with music? Music, surely, has to do with the present moment. We value it as a singularly powerful means of intensifying our sense of the present, not to learn about the past. If we listen to Mozart, it’s for pleasure, not for a snapshot of Viennese life in the 1780s. Nevertheless, that begs the question why we take pleasure in something from such a distant time and place.

The post A mapping of musical modernity appeared first on OUPblog.

You'd probably recognize the rainbow-patterned, lap-size plastic xylophone in the playroom, popular among music-minded toddlers. But what do you know about the real thing? The xylophone is a wooden percussion instrument with a range of four octaves, and can be used in a variety of musical genres.

The post Ten fun facts about the xylophone appeared first on OUPblog.

By Christopher Page

I am struck by the way the recent issue of Early Music devoted to the early romantic guitar provides a timely reminder of how little is known about even the recent history of what is to day today the most popular musical instrument in existence. With millions of devotees worldwide, the guitar eclipses the considerably more expensive piano and allows a beginner to achieve passable results much sooner than the violin. In England, the foundations for this ascendancy were laid in the age of the great Romantic poets. It was during the lifetimes of Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, extending from 1772 to 1834, that the guitar rose from a relatively subsidiary position in Georgian musical life to a place of such fashionable eminence that it rivalled the pianoforte and harp as the chosen instrument of many amateur musicians.

What makes this rise so fascinating is that it was not just a musical matter; the vogue for the guitar in England after 1800 owed much to a new imaginative landscape for the guitar owing much to Romanticism. John Keats, in one of his letters, tellingly associates the guitar with popular novels and serialized romances that were shaped by the interests of a predominantly female readership and were romantic in several senses of the word with their stories of hyperbolized emotion in exotic settings. For Byron, a poet with a wider horizon than Keats, the guitar was a potent image of the Spanish temper as the English commonly imagined it during the Napoleonic wars and long after: passionate and yet melancholic, lyrical and yet bellicose in the defence of political liberty, it gave full play to the Romantic fascination with extremes of sentiment. For Shelley in his Poem “With a Guitar,” the gentle sound of the instrument distilled the voices of Nature who had given the materials of her wooded hillsides to make it, but it also evoked something beyond Nature: the enchantment of Prospero’s isle and a reverie reaching beyond the limitations of sense to “such stuff as dreams are made on.” As the compilers of the Giulianiad, England’s first niche magazine for guitarists, asked in 1833: “What instrument so completely allows us to live, for a time, in a world of our own imagination?”

Given the wealth of material for a social history of the guitar in Regency England, and for its engagement with the romantic imagination, it is surprising that so little has been written about the instrument. It does say something about why England is widely regarded as the poor relation in the family of guitar-playing nations. The fortunes of the guitar in the early nineteenth century are commonly understood in a continental context established especially by contemporary developments in Italy, Spain, and France. To some extent, this is an understandable mistake, for Georgian England received rather more from the European mainland in the matter of guitar playing than she gave, but it is contrary to all indications. But we may discover, in the coming years, that the history of the guitar in England contains much that accords with that nation’s position as the most powerful country, and the most industrially advanced, of Western Europe at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.

There is so much material to consider: references to the guitar and guitarists in newspapers, advertisements, novels, short stories, poems and manuals of deportment, the majority of them published in the metropolis of London. The pictorial sources encompass a great many images of guitars and guitarists in a wealth of prints, mezzotints, lithographs, and paintings. The surviving music comprise a great many compositions for guitar, both in printed versions and in manuscript together with tutors that are themselves important social documents. Electronic resources, though fallible, permit a depth of coverage previously unattainable. Never have the words of John Thomson in the first issue of Early Music been more relevant: we set out on an intriguing journey.

Christopher Page is a long-standing contributor to Early Music. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is Professor of Medieval Music and Literature in the University of Cambridge and Gresham Professor of Music elect at Gresham College in London. In 1981 he founded the professional vocal ensemble Gothic voices, now with twenty-five CDs in the catalogue, from which he retired in 2000 to write his most recent book, The Christian West and its Singers: The first Thousand Years (Yale University Press, 2010).

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Image: Courtesy of Christopher Page. Do not use without permission.

The post The early history of the guitar appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post Block challenges readers to test their Tony knowledge.  We will post the answers next Wednesday so be sure to check back.

1. Who is Tony?

2. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Score?

3. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?

4. What was the second musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?

Hint: This show made its debut only a little more than three months after the first winner.

5. In what year were the Tony Awards first nationally televised?

6. Who has the most Tony Award wins in the Best Score category?

7. What other lyricists and composers (or lyricist-composers) have won two or more Tony’s in the Best Score category?

8. Who has received more Tony’s than anyone else since the awards were established?

9. One winning musical in the Best Score category was the only musical nominated that year.

10. What year produced arguably the most impressive line-up of Tony nominated musicals?

11. So far there has been only one tie in the Best Musical category? Name the two shows.

12. Fourteen times in the last fifty years the Best Musical and Best Score winners were not the same. No less than half of these disparities have occurred in the past twelve years. What are the names of these last seven shows that won the Tony for Best Musical but not Best Score? What shows did win for Best Score in those years?

13. Name the two Best Musicals that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.

14. Name the three Best Musicals losers that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.

15. Starting in 1994, the Tony Awards decided to make the Best Musical Revival its own category instead of forcing musicals to share the award with revivals of plays. In the years since, the Best Musical Revival category has often proven to be fiercely competitive. Name the three winning revivals that first appeared before the launching of the Tony Awards and the four winning revivals that did not win a Tony Award for Best Musical the season of their Broadway debut.

16. The Four Questions: What show won the Tony for Best Musical in 1984? What Pulitzer Prize winning show lost that year? Who wrote the winning score? What controversial remarks did the winner utter on national television?

17. One composer had been dead for nearly 70 years when he won for Best Score. Who was this composer and what musical did he write?

New to me, from the March 2007 issue of Canadian Family magazine, found yesterday at the library: Can You Hear It?, book and accompanying audio cd, by William Lach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (published by Abrams); suggested for ages four to ten. From the Met Store website: A bustling cityscape full of cars and people; the interior of a circus teeming with wild animals; ice-skaters gliding