The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2014

The latest edition of NABMSA Reviews is now out and can be accessed at

http://nabmsa.org/pdfs/nabmsa-reviews/NABMSAReviews1.2.pdf?

compiled by Jennifer Oates

Journal News

Journal of Film Music, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2, is a special double issue in memoriam to Anne Dhu McLucas. Seventeen articles from the “From Nineteenth-Century Stage Melodrama to Twenty-First Century Film Scoring: Musicodramatic Practice and Knowledge Organization” conference held at California State University, Long Beach, in 2012.

Scottish Journal of Performance (http://www.scottishjournalofperformance.org/) is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal managed by doctoral students and published by The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. The board consist of faculty members from the Royal Conservatoire and the University of Edinburgh. The journal’s goal is “to promote and stimulate discussion, development and dissemination of original research” on Scottish performance, Scottish music, or research by Scottish scholars and artists. The first two issues are available via the journal’s website.

Articles

Bernard Hughes, Bernard. “Sound Judgment: Piers Hellawell in Interview.” Tempo 68 (October 2014): 48-56.

“In Memoriam: Malcolm MacDonald (1948-2014).” Tempo 68 (October 2014): 68-73.

Johnstone, H. Diack. “Westminster Abbey and the Academy of Ancient Music: A Library once Lost and now Partially Recovered.” Music and Letters 95/3 (August 2014): 329-373.

McGuire, Charles Edward. “John Bull, Angelica Catalani and Middle-Class Taste at the 1820s British Musical Festival.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11/1 (June 2014): 3-31.

Rogers, Vanessa L. “John Gay, Ballad Opera and the Théâtres de la foire.” Eighteenth-Century Music, 11/2 (September 2014): 173-213.

Scheer, Christopher. “The Importance of Cheltenham: Imperialism, Liminality and Gustav Holst.” Journal of Victorian Culture 19/3 (2014): 365-82.

Taylor, Benedict. “The Triumph in the Eighteenth Century: Handel’s Il Trionfo del Tempo  and Historical Conceptions of Musical Temporality.” Eighteenth-Century Music, 11/2 (September 2014): 257-281.

Whitehead, Lance. “Three London Harpsichord Makers: Slade, Mahoon, and Hitchcock.” Keyboard Perspectives 6 (2013).

Windram, Heather F., Terence Charlston, and Christopher J. Howe. “A Phylogenetic Analysis of Orlando Gibbons’s Prelude in G.” Early Music 42/4 (November 2014): 515-28.

Winkler, Amanda Eubanks. “Politics and the Reception of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.” Cambridge Opera Journal 26/3 (November 2014): 271–287.

Books

Frogley, Alain and Aidan J. Thomson. The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Herissone, Rebecca. Musical Creativity in Restoration England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Rodmell, Paul. Opera in the British Isles, 1875-1918. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

Seddon, Laura. British Women Composers and Instrumental Chamber Music in the Early Twentieth Century. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

Scores

Birtwistle, Harrison. Oboe Quartet. For Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello. London: Boosey, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Collected Songs, High Voice (63 Songs). Edited by Richard Walters. London: Boosey, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Collected Songs, Medium/Low Voice (60 Songs). Edited by Richard Walters. London: Boosey, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Six Early Songs (1929-31), Medium Voice. London: Faber Music, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Three songs for Les Illuminations. Words by Arthur Rimbaud. Orchestra for High Voice and Strings by Colin Matthews. Full Score. London: Boosey, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Two Pieces for Violin, Viola, and Piano (1929). London: Faber, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Two Psalms: Out of the Deep; Praise Ye the Lord. Full Score. London: Chester, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Two Psalms for SATB Chorus and Orchestra. Vocal Score. London: Chester, 2013.

Britten, Benjamin. Variations for Piano (1965). London: Faber, 2013.

Davies, Peter Maxwell. Orkney Saga V: Westerly Gale in Biscay, Salt in the Bread Broken. For Orchestra and Chorus (SATB). London: Boosey, 2013.

English Keyboard Music c. 1600-1625. Edited by Alan Brown. Musica Britannica, v. 96. London: Stainer, 2014.

Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music VIII: Settings of the Gloria and Credo. Transcribed and Edited by Peter Wright. Early English Church Music, v. 55. London: Published for the British Academy by Stainer & Bell, 2013.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Bucolic Suite. Edited by Julian Rushton. Study Score. Oxford: Oxford, 2012.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Burley Heath. Edited by James Francis Brown. Study Score. Oxford: Oxford, 2013.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra. Edited by Graham Parlett. Study Score. Oxford: Oxford, 2013.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Harnham Down. Edited by James Francis Brown. Study Score. Oxford: Oxford, 2013.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Serenade in A Minor (1898). Edited by Julian Rushton. Study Score. Oxford: Oxford, 2012.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. The Solent. Edited by James Francis Brown. Study Score. Oxford: Oxford, 2013.

DVDs

Elgar, Edward. Enigma Variations. DVD. Leonard Bernstein/BBC Symphony Orchestra. Directed by Peter Butler and Humphrey Burton. [London]: ICA Classics, 2013. ICAD 5098.

 

“Nettle Tea and a Trunk Full of Documents” by Christina Bashford (below) was first published in January 2008 on the Boydell and Brewer blog, following the publication of her monograph, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. I thank her for suggesting this article for the NABMSA blog’s new series “Stories from the Archives” and for allowing NABMSA to re-post the story. If you have archival stories of your own that you would like to share, please send them my way.

M Meinhart 

Nettle Tea and a Trunk Full of Documents

The Pursuit of High Culture centers on the life story of one man. He is John Ella, an eminent, overlooked Victorian, whose activities as concert manager and prophet for serious chamber music gave him a unique and significant role in musical life in nineteenth-century London. As the Boydell publicity will rightly tell you, there is, within the book’s pages, much else besides (including the history of a concert institution and metropolitan musical culture). Yet it is Ella’s biography that gives the book its shape and structure, not to mention its ‘period’ flavour.Now, unfortunately, for many of the ‘middle men’ of music history (people like Ella), there are no surviving archives containing the hard documentary evidence we need to do solid research. And for music historians, this is something of a tragedy, because it makes the writing of detailed biographies well-nigh impossible. Indeed, in the early days of my research into Victorian chamber music (in the mid-1980s), I concluded this was the situation as regards Ella, even though I had discovered, with considerable frustration, that only thirty years earlier, archives relating to Ella’s life had been extant. A 1950s article from the periodical Music and Letters, written by an amateur music-lover named John Ravell, made tantalizing references to such materials, but gave no source of reference as to where they could be found. I had searched high and low in bibliographies and in the catalogues of libraries and archives for an indication of where these materials might be, but with no success. So eventually, having been unable to trace Mr Ravell either, I accepted that the trail had gone cold.Imagine my utter surprise and delight, then, when a few years later I received a letter from that very man, John Ravell. He had somehow discovered that I was researching London chamber music concerts, and wondered whether I might be interested in visiting him, as he had a few bits and pieces which he thought I might like to see….What he had, I slowly learned, was a large cache of manuscripts relating to John Ella: pocket diaries, photographs, scrapbooks, letters, account books and so on, all kept in a large, rusty iron trunk. The material had been in the hands of indirect descendants of Ella’s, and had been both located and later saved from the rubbish tip by the extraordinary persistence and foresight of John Ravell himself. Over three or four years, as I gained his trust, Mr Ravell, then in his late seventies, allowed me access to the entire collection.It was quite a palaver, even a ritual. I would visit his house, a great barn of a place – musty and austere – in north London, on Friday afternoons at 3pm. On arrival he made me tea, nettle tea to be precise, and we sat and talked about chamber music, historical research, John Ella (of course) and other things. Eventually he would tire of talking and bring me one of the manuscripts and leave me alone at a makeshift desk, to make feverish notes for a couple of hours. Then came more tea and conversation, and I would leave to make my two-hour journey home, eager for the next Friday when I could continue my work. Although progress was slow, the excitement of this discovery, the smell of the Victorian notebooks, and the buzz I got from feeling the immediacy of John Ella’s life before me, and from knowing that this was all material that had never been worked through thoroughly, is difficult to explain. Suffice to say it got me completely hooked, and once a week I travelled happily to the world of nineteenth-century London music and musicians.

Meanwhile John Ravell became thrilled that I was pursuing this line of research, the more so when I told him I had decided to write a definitive biography of Ella once my PhD was completed. A book on Ella had been something he had always wanted to see – the true recognition of Ella’s importance – but he had latterly come to realize he would never write it himself. Now, nearly twenty years later the Ella papers are safely housed in Oxford University libraries and I have finally finished the book I promised John Ravell such a long while ago. Unfortunately, Mr Ravell has not lived to see the completed product. I regret that intensely, because it would have given him great pleasure to see John Ella’s significance recognized on the bookshelf. For like John Ella, John Ravell was a quite exceptional and visionary man.