Danish Yearbook of Musicology, volume 40 · 2016
Editorial – Michael Fjeldsøe, Peter Hauge & Thomas Holme Hansen
Articles
When dealing with the critical editing of music of the eighteenth century, it seems fairly easy to select the composer’s ink fair manuscript as copy text – that is, if such a manuscript has survived. In a few cases, however, also the original performance material is available. The article argues that it is important to take into account the instrumental parts and use them actively in the editing process as they reveal a different set of contexts to that of the ink fair copy scores. Scheibe’s Passion Cantata of 1769 is used as an example of the various problems an editor encounters for, since a contemporary score has not survived, it is necessary to employ the performance material. In addition, the set of parts is incomplete forcing the critical editor to reconstruct the tenor part basing it on the cue notes in the harpsichord and violin parts, for instance. Overall, the material creates a number of intricate problems since it contains contradictory information on performance practice, and the editor has therefore to make some difficult choices.
The attempt to represent final authorial intentions in some form is still a common principle in Scandinavian music editions, despite the fact that similar principles have long been criticized in the field of textual criticism. The article points out some of the general problems of such concepts, including the divergent forces of authority and finality. The recent difficulties of editing Niels Wilhelm Gade’s cantata Comala under the Gade Edition’s Fassung letzter Hand perspective illustrate these problems. The article suggests that aspects such as reception history or the composer’s authority alone may be better points of departure for future editions than concepts focusing on temporality.
Søren Møller Sørensen,
Mahmūd Darwīsh and Marcīl Khalīfa: Art and Commitment, pp. 43-65
The Lebanese composer, musician and singer Marcīl Khalīfa (b. 1950) has for decades been a central figure in Middle Eastern music. Early in his career he became acquainted with the poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmūd Darwīsh (1941–2008) and set some of his most beloved early poems in music. Some of the resulting songs such as ilā ’ummi (To my Mother) and jawāz safar (A Passport) are still beloved and often played and heard.
This article takes issue with political and aesthetic positions of these two artists. Both take their point of departure in the political left and both are strongly committed to issues of modern Arab national identity and particularly to the Palestinian issue. But in their works, in their public statements, and in the critical discourses on them we also find a negotiation of the relation between political commitment and societal responsibility and modern artists’ rightful claim on artistic autonomy. The article traces this negotiation in Western as well as Arab sources.
Special section: RadioMusic
Papers from the LARM conference ‘Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and -Cultural Memory’, Copenhagen, 14–15 November 2013 (whole section)
Michael Fjeldsøe,
The Concept of ‘Radio Music’, pp. 70–78
In the late 1920s, young composers and musicians turned towards new fields of activity and new media in order to reach a larger audience. In Germany, this effort was part of the movement of Neue Sachlichkeit, and for a short period of time Radiomusik was considered the ideal means for a democratic, educational and didactic effort which would enlighten all of society. For a while it seemed that radio music was considered a genre of its own. To fulfil its function, radio music had to consider technical limitations as well as the educational level and listening modes of the new mass audience. Public radio, as discussed by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith, was at first greeted with great expectations, but soon a more realistic attitude prevailed. Weill, himself a radio critic as well, composed Der Lindberghflug (1929) as a piece of ‘radio music theatre’, but then changed some of its features in order to turn it into a didactical play for amateurs, a so-called Lehrstück. The article presents the concept of ‘radio music’ developed within German Neue Sachlichkeit and discusses the relevance of such a concept for current research in the field of radio and music.
Politically, Europe was dominated by both renewed national movements and tendencies towards internationalism in the decades following World War I. As a new and strong medium, radio became a tool for supporting nation-building in individual countries and for developing international relations, for example through the International Broadcasting Union (IBU). In this article I look at this apparent paradox by investigating a few aspects of the Danish music repertoire and the principles for radio transmission. I demonstrate how the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) practised both principles in their programming without seeing it as a problem in any way. The enormous amount of music, which radio made it possible to listen to, contributed to this – not least because the music always became more or less con-textualized thanks to radio’s many metatexts. In this way music in early radio contributed to a certain understanding of the modern, the ‘other’, and the new, making them less strange. At the same time radio articulated a well-known, ‘homely’ music background as the basis for understanding the new.
Mikkel Vad,
Sounds and Voices from the Past. Using archive material in radio music shows, pp. 87–95
The article is a critical engagement with the construction of cultural memory and performance of liveness when using archive material in radio shows and is based on the author’s experience as a radio presenter. Theoretically it is framed by Aleida Assmann’s concepts of storage memory and functional memory.
Firstly, a show presenting historical concert recordings of classical music, the ‘P2 Gold Concert’, is analysed to show how radio presenters emphasize liveness to eliminate the historicity of the recording. However, such evocation of liveness is only possible because of the recorded nature of the archive material. Secondly, a show presenting archived interviews, reports, features, etc. of jazz music and musicians, ‘From the Archive’, is analysed with particular regard to how a virtual soundscape or mise-en-scéne of ‘old’ technology is created to perform an imaginary archive and how the archive is fetishized. Again, this presentation and the values it holds is only possible because of the recorded, mediatized nature of the archive material.
Thus, in both shows the presenter uses fictionalizing strategies of performance to present the archive material, and these strategies in fact highlight the disjunctures and connections between storage memory and functional memory.
Obituaries
Jan Maegaard 14.4.1926–27.11.2012 – Claus Røllum-Larsen, pp. 97–99
Finn Mathiassen 2.3.1928–20.1.2013 – Finn Egeland Hansen, pp. 100–101
Frede V. Nielsen 10.5.1942–21.3.2013 – Michael Fjeldsøe & Sven-Erik Holgersen, p
p. 101-102
Research Projects
RAMUND: A Century of Music and Radio in Denmark. Music genres, radio genres and mediatisation
– Morten Michelsen
Ph.D. Projects
Professional Music Teacher Practice – Finn Holst
Living a Jazz Life: constructions of identity and genre in face-to-face interviews with Danish
jazz musicians of the 1950s – Ole Izard Høyer
‘All Yugoslavia Is Dancing Rock and Roll’: Yugoslavness and the sense of community in the
1980s Yu-rock – Zlatko Jovanovic
Analytical Paradigms in Western Music Theory – Thomas Jul Kirkegaard-Larsen
Music Video Today: audiovisual remediation in post-millennial music video – Mathias Korsgaard
Rap, Rights, Respect. A musical anthropology of citizenship, cosmopolitanism and brown
rappers in Denmark – Kristine Ringsager
Function of Form – Melopoetic method in song analysis with special regard to church hymns
with texts by N.F.S. Grundtvig – Lea Wierød
Conferences
Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Certaldo, July 2013 – Thomas Holme Hansen
Nineteenth-Century Grand Opera outside Paris, Copenhagen, December 2014 – Jens Hesselager
Second Congress of the Russian Society for Theory of Music, Moscow, September
2015 – Thomas Jul Kirkegaard-Larsen
Seventeenth Nordic Musicological Congress, Aalborg, August 2015 – Mikkel Vad
Danish Musicological Society, 2012/2013-2015/2016 – Peder Kaj Pedersen
Reviews
Katharine Leiska, Skandinavische Musik in Deutschland um 1900. Symphonien von Christian Sinding, Victor Bendix und Carl Nielsen zwischen Gattungstradition und Nord-Imagines – Daniel M. Grimley, pp. 117–121
Ulrik Volgsten, Musiken, medierna och lagarna. Musikverkets idéhistoria och etablerandet av en idealistisk upphovsrätt – Johannes Frandsen Skjelbo, pp. 121–123
Michael Fjeldsøe, Kulturradikalismens musik – Peder Kaj Pedersen, pp. 123–125
Bibliography 2012-14 – Anne Ørbæk Jensen, pp. 126–172
Information
Publications received; Contributors to this issue, pp. 173-175
Guidelines for authors; Danish Musicological Society, pp. 176-177