JAMS 67/3 (Fall 2014)
Volume 67, no. 3, of the Journal of the American Musicological Society—or JAMS, as it is familiarly known—is now live online. Two of the articles (Candelaria, Mundy) and the section Digital and Multimedia Scholarship contain embedded multimedia.
Subscriptions to the Journal of the American Musicological Society are included with AMS membership; the online version is available through JSTOR.
Here is the table of contents of the new issue, followed by abstracts of the four articles.
Journal of the American Musicological Society
VOLUME 67 · NUMBER 3 · FALL 2014
Articles
Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia Christiana:
A Catholic Songbook from Sixteenth-Century New Spain
LORENZO CANDELARIA
The Music of Power: Parisian Opera and the Politics of Genre, 1806–1864
MARK EVERIST
Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to America
RACHEL MUNDY
Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde:
Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975
BENJAMIN PIEKUT
Reviews
The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons,
and Politics, by Gretchen Peters
CAROL SYMES
Music and the Politics of Negation, by James R. Currie
NICHOLAS MATHEW
Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism,
by Joshua S. Walden
DAVID E. SCHNEIDER
Digital and Multimedia Scholarship
Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works
STEFANO MENGOZZI
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads; English Broadside Ballad Archive
AMANDA EUBANKS WINKLER
Arnold Schönberg Center; Britten Thematic Catalog; John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive
JOSEPH AUNER
ABSTRACTS
Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia Christiana:
A Catholic Songbook from Sixteenth-Century New Spain
LORENZO CANDELARIA
In Mexico City, 1583, Pedro Ocharte published the first book of vernacular sacred song in the Americas—the Psalmodia Christiana (Christian Psalmody) by Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish missionary of the Franciscan Order. Sahagún composed his book of 333 songs in the Nahuatl language during the second half of the sixteenth century to promote the formation of Catholic Mexica (better known as “Aztec”) communities in the central valley of Mexico. Well-received in its day as a primer on tenets of the Catholic faith, the life of Christ, and the virtues of the saints, it was denounced before the Inquisition in the eighteenth century and has otherwise existed in the shadow of Sahagún’s monumental Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, a pioneering anthropological study of the Mexica that did not become widely available until the nineteenth century. This article repositions the undervalued Psalmodia Christiana as a polished outcome of the anthropological research for which Sahagún is most remembered, setting in relief the understudied legacy of Western plainchant in the Christian evangelization of the New World and, more broadly, the extent to which the Mexica’s native traditions were folded into the apostolic work of Catholic missionaries in post-Tridentine New Spain.
Lorenzo Candelaria is Professor of Music at the University of Texas at El Paso.
The Music of Power: Parisian Opera and the Politics of Genre, 1806–1864
MARK EVERIST
Mark Everist is a professorial fellow at the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London.
Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to America
RACHEL MUNDY
As we consider music’s role in defining races, cultures, and species, musicologists may benefit from examining more closely the history of conceptions of musical style. That history offers an opportunity to reassess the question of how and how much one of the core tools of music scholarship—the recognition and categorization of musical style—reflects a historical tradition of categorizing culture as a form of essential, biologized difference. This exercise seems particularly relevant in the present moment, when scholarly style categories converge with a renewed interest in evolutionary science. Tracing notions of style from the days of Guido Adler to the present, I argue that classifications of musical style have offered a way for music scholars to explore changing concepts of human difference. By asking what it means to identify a musical style, it is possible to engage more sensitively with music’s power to classify human cultures, define human beings, and demarcate the perimeter of the humanities.
Rachel Mundy is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Pittsburgh.
Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde:
Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975
BENJAMIN PIEKUT
John Cage’s brand of experimentalism underwent a transformation when it was imported into the UK in the 1960s. There, in contradiction to the American’s well-known preferences, indeterminacy became twisted up with jazz-derived free improvisation, owing to discourse that stressed performer freedom and creativity while downplaying notions of non-intention and discipline. The authors of these commentaries created the discursive conditions for a mingling of avant-garde traditions, but the material conditions owed more to the efforts of Victor Schonfield, whose nonprofit organization, Music Now, acquired Arts Council subsidies on behalf of a stylistically heterogeneous avant-garde that included artists working with both improvisation and indeterminacy. Schonfield also invited important guests from overseas, including Ornette Coleman, Musica Elettronica Viva, the Sonic Arts Union, the Instant Composers Pool, Christian Wolff, Sun Ra, the Taj Mahal Travellers, and, in 1972, John Cage himself. In the greater ecology of experimentalism that Schonfield created, improvisation became a kind of contact zone where musicians came together from a number of directions, among them free jazz, score-based indeterminacy, text-based intuitive music, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and even psychedelic rock freak-outs. Music Now produced over 80 concerts between 1968 and 1976, when the organization folded.
Benjamin Piekut is a historian of experimental music, jazz, and rock, and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Cornell University.
