Danish Yearbook of Musicology, volume 42 · 2018
Section 1 · Articles (volume 42:1)
Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s theory of idyll in poetry, the text asks for the relevance of idyll for the music of Niels W. Gade, exemplarily with regard to his choral-orchestral Frühlings-Botschaft op. 35 to a text by Emanuel Geibel. Contemporary reception, which explicitly classified the piece as ‘idyll’, praised it for several decades. Analysis of text and music suggests that this connectivity might be the consequence of the composition’s managing of creating a hypertrophy of aesthetic and structural layers, yet in an ulterior manner. With regard to Schiller’s utopia of Elysian idyll, Gade’s composition appears to come close to its ideal: by evoking tension without struggle, idyll without stagnancy. And it might be these kinds of assets that form not only a central trait of Gade’s choralorchestral work but of his music in general.
Richard Wagner, Alban Berg, and intellectuals of the Russian Silver Age are compared and contrasted in ways that draw up specific examples of how Wagner’s theories and aesthetics were integral in forming the morals and perceptions of Berg and the Russians, both for their personal truths as well as for that of their art. The concept of Expressionism is the cement that fuses all these ideals and individuals across the aesthetic landscape between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Wagner is shown to be a forerunner of Expressionism due to his early ideas about the role of culture in society. The article also reveals that his later, more important preoccupation with inner states of consciousness and being were recognized and valued by Expressionists from a variety of art forms. The important distinction being, however, that recognition of these traits within Wagner’s output was only the beginning. Indeed, both Berg and the Russians would appropriate Wagnerian ideals for their own purposes, thereby simultaneously evolving and morphing the foundation that Wagner established for them in order to enact the changes they felt to be natural and necessary.
In the middle of the fifteenth century a principal concern of the new sacred genre, the cyclic cantus firmus mass, was the question of musical and liturgical unity. How to balance the quest for unity and the wish for diversty in musical expression or varietas, which Tinctoris advised in his teachings of counterpoint. I take a closer look at an anonymous mass dating from the decade just after 1450, the Missa Sine nomine in MS Cappella Sistina 14, in which the composer was intensely involved with the problem of unity, so involved that he – according to our ideas about music – has focused on ‘unity’ to such a degree that it became rather to the detriment of ‘diversity’. The mass was highly regarded in its time, and this fact puts our aesthetic understanding of the period’s music to test. In addition to the classical analysis of how such a cantus firmus mass is structured as a musical architecture transmitted in writing, we have to ponder how it served as a sounding reality, and how it may have related to the little we know about the musical practices of the period.
Section 2 · Reviews (volume 42:2)
Thomas Holme,
Værkfortegnelser (Nielsen, Hartmann og Scheibe). Review essay, pp. 3–20
Niels Bo Foltmann, Axel Teich Geertinger, Peter Hauge,
Niels Krabbe, Bjarke Moe and Elly Bruunshuus Petersen), Catalogue of Carl Nielsen’s Works. Danish Humanist Texts and Studies, 53.
Copenhagen: The Royal Library / Museum Tusculanum Press, 2016.
Inger Sørensen, J. P. E. Hartmann. Thematic-bibliographic Catalogue of his Works. Danish Humanist Texts and Studies, 56. Copenhagen: The Royal Library / Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017
Peter Hauge, Johann Adolph Scheibe. A Catalogue of His Works. Danish Humanist Texts and Studies, 58. Copenhagen: The Royal Library / Museum Tusculanum Press, 2017
Section 3 · Bibliography (volume 42:3)
Anne Ørbæk Jensen,
Bibliography of Danish musicology 2017, pp. 3–35
Section 4 · Reports and Editorial (volume 42:4)
Research projects