Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The historical past played perhaps a more important role in Mendelssohn's music than in that of any other composer. This article approaches the work traditionally seen as his first major compositional achievement, the Octet in E♭ Major for Strings, op. 20 (1825), from the perspective of the composer's strong historical sense and takes up ideas of musical memory, history, and circular narrative journey as embodied in the cyclical structure of the piece. The Octet enacts a coming to self-consciousness of its own musical history, a process with close parallels in the writings of Goethe and Hegel, both of whom Mendelssohn knew personally. In its cyclical manipulations of musical time, Mendelssohn's Octet sets up a new formal and expressive paradigm for a musical work that would be of major significance for the instrumental music of the later nineteenth century.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Richard Wagner's Siegfried constitutes something of an anomaly within the Ring cycle: the epic narrative of the Nibelungs and Valsungs grinds to a virtual halt, while two characters, Mime and Siegfried, reenact the fairy tale of the “youth who went forth to learn what fear is.” The fairy tale's mythic framework nevertheless reasserts itself within the fairytale enclosure in the guise of sexuality, in particular sexual difference: As Siegfried begins asking troubling questions about his paternity, Mime is thrust into the role of unitary origin, culminating in his desperate claim that he is Siegfried's “father and mother.” This article explores how exactly Wagner stages the tug of war between Siegfried and Mime over sexual difference, in particular in act I of Siegfried, allying different ways of conceiving descent, knowledge, and love with either the epic or the anti-epic (which Wagner associates with the fairy tale). This turns the generic struggle at the heart of Siegfried into a struggle between two kinds of families laying claim to Siegfried's paternity: the Gods of Valhalla who reproduce sexually, and the Nibelungs who are capable only of asexual reproduction of the self-same. This article argues that Wagner draws on his own speculations on sexuality, race, and history, in particular his idiosyncratic reading of Schopenhauer, to overlay this opposition not only with moral significations, but racial ones as well.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Vladimir Jankélévitch heard Debussy's music as a sonic manifestation of certain nuclear mysteries of existence: mysteries of death, destiny, anguish, pleasure, love, space, and—in various forms—time. To describe these mysteries, he developed the paradoxical locution of the mystére limpide, the “lucid mystery.” Debussy's mysteries are lucid, Jankélévitch argued, in that they are not hidden behind arcane codes or hermetic formalisms, but are instead palpably present to experience, sensually manifest in the music's sounding surface. As such, they prove resistant to hermeneutic and analytical attention, which, per Jankélévitch, seek always to penetrate beyond sounding surfaces in search of hidden meanings.</jats:p> <jats:p>This article takes Jankélévitch's ideas as a point of departure in both a positive and negative sense, adopting his notion of the mystére limpide as a valuable heuristic in Debussy study, but challenging his highly limited views of analysis and hermeneutics. The article takes as its focus Debussy's Prélude Des pas sur la neige and explores the ways in which it can be heard to manifest mystéres of time, representation, and consciousness. It does this, however, with the aid of analysis and hermeneutics, drawing on transformational theory, familiar concepts from narratology, and Proustian notions of memory. In short, the article deploys discourses anathema to Jankélévitch for decidedly Jankélévitchian ends. The conclusion explores the degrees to which such a paradoxical effort succeeds, ultimately arguing that discursive intervention—technical or otherwise—need not be a means of seeking out hidden meanings, but can instead be a means of drawing us closer to music as a physical, material phenomenon.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Wagner's engagement with medieval sources like the Nibelungenlied has generally been examined in relation to poetic style in his librettos. One of the defining structural features of his literary inspirations is the narrative interlace structure, which is common to literature, art, and even manuscript organization in the Middle Ages. In place of the classical Aristotelian unity of time, place, and action, the interlace design sets up a literary form based on sudden disjunctions, mysterious failures of explanation, and multiplicities of motive. These formal models propose radically different views of reality and the self: one suggests that human experience is shaped by a culmination that can already be known, the other more contingent, fractured, and paradoxically ““modern.”” Wagner's incorporation of the interlace design operates in the libretto and, more significantly and complexly, in the music. Wagner's structural and philosophical engagement with his medieval sources in the Ring may be elucidated via a combination of neo-Riemannian and modified Schenkerian analytical approaches and a sensitivity to Wagner's tendency to highlight the structural joints between his massive interlaced threads (rather than smoothly modulating, as the prevalent view suggests). The work is seen to have an existentialist, not an essentialist, view of human nature that provided an intellectual model for the artists and thinkers that grew up in Wagner's considerable intellectual shadow.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise and gentle decline of an unprecedented vogue, particularly in the English-speaking world, for crafting hymn tunes from the work of Europe's most revered composers. Indeed, through the widely circulated publications of Lowell Mason and several like-minded American editors, it was in the form of hymnody that the European classical tradition reached a substantial part of the American population for the first time.</jats:p> <jats:p>After setting forth broadly the historical underpinnings of such adaptations' dissemination, this study seeks to bring an unprecedented critical focus to the examination of a much-maligned repertoire through an exploration of the hymn tunes based on the work of one of its leading beneficiaries, Felix Mendelssohn. Gathered here are fifty-eight hymn tunes drawn from Mendelssohn's work, capturing what appears (based on a survey of 250 tune books and hymnals) to be the entry point of each particular melody into the American hymn repertoire. This body of music permits us not only to explore a multiplicity of approaches to the adaptation process itself, but to articulate a set of fundamental shifts that appear to have occurred in the genre as the nineteenth century wore on. From the late 1850s onward, we see not only a markedly heightened eagerness to adhere, in the adaptation process, to Mendelssohn's compositional will, but a pronounced move in the selection of melodic material away from the adventurous, catch-as-catch-can breadth of the mid-century publications toward tunes drawn from a more tightly circumscribed body of works that were coming to enjoy an established place in the concert repertoire at large.</jats:p>