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[Gago da Camarada Camara]

(b Rio de Janeiro c1769; d Rio de Janeiro, July 19, 1835) Brazilian composer, performer of viola (five-course guitar) and cavaquinho (machete), and author of modinhas. Mixed-race and self-taught, unable to read or write music, he was considered an amateur, whose improvised verses with viola accompaniment belonged to oral tradition. His more than 20 modinhas would have been lost had they not been written down by musicians who witnessed his performances in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, especially Sigismund Neukomm (1778–1858). Born in Rio de Janeiro, as a child he spent some time with his father in Bahia. In the last years of the 18th century he left for Lisbon, where he became successful performing in salons. Thanks to the habit of including modinhas in the intermezzi of popular theaters, at least two of them were presented at the Theatro do Salitre, in the early years of the 19th century, in versions by ...

Article

Salomea Gandelman

(b São João del Rei, Minas Gerais, Brazil, Aug 20, 1943; d Rio de Janeiro, Nov 27, 2002). Brazilian musicologist, composer, and conductor. Son of the violinist, composer, chapel master, and orchestra director Telêmaco Vitor Neves, he began studying music at the age of five, with his sister Maria Stella Neves Valle, then enrolled at a French Dominican Catholic school in Juiz de Fora (1955–63), where he joined the youth choir, becoming an assistant director. After studying philosophy at the Studium Generale Dominicano (1963–4) in São Paulo, he moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1965, where he studied with Esther Scliar (theory, solfeggio, musical analysis) and Guerra-Peixe (counterpoint and fugue, composition).

In 1969, with a scholarship from the French government, Neves studied composition, conducting, and choral conducting at Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, while specializing on electroacoustic music with Pierre Schaeffer both at the Conservatoire and with an intership at the ORTF ...

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Modesto Flávio Chagas Fonseca

(b São João del-Rei, Brazil, Aug 23, 1819; d São João del-Rei, Jan 22, 1887) Brazilian priest, musician, and composer, son of Alferes João Xavier da Silva Ferrão and Dona Maria José Benedicta from Miranda. A member of a family of musicians, he was the grandson of José Joaquim de Miranda, founder of the Lira Sanjoanense Orchestra in 1776, which also included family musicians. José Maria Xavier began his music studies with his uncle Francisco de Paula Miranda, and around 1827 he started to sing as a tiple in the Lira Sanjoanense. A decade later he was playing clarinet and violin in the same ensemble. In 1845, at the age of 26, after overcoming the rigor of the process called De genere, vitae et moribus, he was admitted to the Seminary of Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte, in the city of Mariana, where he started his preparatory studies for an ecclesiastical career. He was ordained a priest on ...

Article

Gustavo Alonso

A rural genre that emerged in the Brazilian countryside (the term means ‘related to or from the sertão’ (‘hinterland’)), especially the South Central states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Goiás during the early to mid-20th century. The first commercial recording, Cornélio Pires’s Jorginho do sertão, was produced in 1929. Since then, sertanejo has been associated with the poor and peripheral areas of the Brazilian rural hinterland, often treated with disdain by the intellectual elites of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Facing the urbanization and quick industrialization of the country, sertanejo music has continuously affirmed the agricultural origins of Brazilian people.

Terms like música caipira, música sertaneja, rural music, music from the planting fields, countryside music, and others, have been used in reference to the music of the hinterland without too much negative connotation or polarization. The definition of sertanejo music as a distinctive genre took place after the mid-1950s, with the emergence of a number of specific traits. Artists such as Cascatinha & Inhana and Pedro Bento & Zé da Estrada, among others, began to import Latin genres, especially the Mexican ...

Article

Pélter Király and János Malina

(Hung. Kismarton)

City in Austria, the capital of Burgenland. Count Nicolaus Esterházy (1582?–1645) received Eisenstadt castle as a royal gift in 1622. He and his successor, Count Ladislaus (1626–52), had a small music ensemble consisting of local and Austrian or German musicians. Nicolaus’s other son, Count (from 1687 on, Prince) Paul Esterházy (1635–1713), who transformed the castle into a baroque palace during the 1660s, gradually established there an ensemble of noteworthy size. Around 170 musicians are documented between 1652 and 1713, coming partly from the Hungarian-Austrian border region, with a substantial number from Austrian and South German provinces, and a few from Poland/Silesia. Esterházy’s ensemble—directed (with a lacuna after 1704, due to the Kuruc insurgency in Hungary) by a chori regent or Kapellmeister from the 1670s—reached its heyday in 1703–1704, consisting of 12–14 ‘musicians’ (singers, castratos, and string-, lute-, and harp-players) with added trumpeters, drummers, pipers, and, after ...

Article

Jackson Cooper

(b Pittsburgh, June 30, 1954). American composer and conductor. He was the first African American to hold a Music Director position with an American orchestra in the South. He studied the viola at the age of 11 and began conducting at the age of 14, under Eugene Reichenfeld in Pittsburgh. He attended Oberlin Conservatory, studying the viola and conducting from 1972 to 1975 before leaving to become the Assistant Conductor of the Richmond Symphony at the age of 21, serving from 1975 to 1977. He has conducted the Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, National, Detroit, Denver, American, Chicago, and San Diego symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Israel Camerata Jerusalem orchestra (1997). He traveled to Thailand (1992) and Taiwan (2000 and 2002) on behalf of the US State Department to conduct and give workshops on American music. His appointments include the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Assistant Conductor, ...

Article

Karen M. Cook

[BozonvilleBousonvillaBouzanvilleBousavillaBossauvillaBusanvillaBousanvilla]

(d 1405). French musician. Richardus de Bozonvilla is first recorded as cubicularius for Cardinal Jean de Blauzac in January of 1371. He remained in the Cardinal’s household until de Blauzac’s death in 1379, at which point he joined Avignonese Pope Clement VII’s chapel. He acted as magister capellae for the last two or three years of Clement’s reign; after Clement’s death, he remained with Benedict XIII, where he officially became magister capellae around 1397. In 1400, Richardus became provost of the Cathedral of Apt, where he might have helped compile the manuscript F-APT 16bis, and he might also have composed or copied a polyphonic hymn in Apt 9. Richardus rejoined Benedict XIII’s chapel in Pont-de-Sorgues in 1403, where he stayed until his death in 1405. Between 1371 and his death, Richardus assembled a host of high-ranking positions at numerous locations throughout France and the Low Countries, he retained his own familiar, Johannes Hobaut, and he was permitted to make a will disposing of his goods and monies, all of which led Andrew Tomasello to state that he was the most highly prebended papal musician of his day....

Article

Eric Peterson and Anne Beetem Acker

(Fr. le bois de lutherieGer. tonholz)

Informal and commercial term for any species of wood believed to affect acoustic properties in musical instrument making. It typically refers to wood components of chordophones including the violin family, guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, harps, and acoustic and hybrid keyboards such as pianos, harpsichords, and clavichords; struck idiophones such as the marimba; woodwind aerophones including clarinets, oboes, piccolos, and bassoons; and various folk instruments.

The acoustic characteristics of types of wood are related to their physical and mechanical properties. The most important metrics of those properties for tonewoods are the elastic modulus (also known as coefficient of elasticity – the ratio of applied stress to change in shape), in-plane shear modulus (modulus of rigidity in a planar direction), and Poisson’s ratios (deformation perpendicular to direction of an applied force). Other commonly used metrics include density, specific gravity (relative density), Young’s modulus (how easily an elastic material stretches and deforms), Janka hardness (resistance to denting and wear), and tensile strength....

Article

Katherine M. Leo

The applied investigation of musical works as intellectual property. Contemporary use of the word ‘forensic’ in this context appears briefly during the mid-19th century in US federal music copyright litigation records to denote comparative analyses produced by music specialists, before reaching common use by the early 21st century. Delay in acceptance of the term ‘forensic musicology’ may be due at least in part to federal copyright jurisprudence famously codified in Arnstein v. Porter, which required at common law the contributions of musical expert witnesses, which were legally presumed to be objective, as part of infringement inquiries. The subsequent increased frequency of infringement lawsuits involving music has further coalesced current usage of the term.

Forensic analyses primarily serve to distinguish musical commonality from copying. These analyses entail assessments of similarity as well as matters of originality and creative process to the extent they might inform legal decision-making. Since the 19th century, analysts have tended to conduct detailed comparisons between various combinations of discrete musical elements as documented in legally admissible evidence, often prioritizing melody, harmony, and rhythm. As the court explained in ...

Article

Lacey Golaszewski

Exam solos, composed for conservatory exit exams in performance. Developed from traditions at the Paris Conservatory’s predecessors, the solos de concours were instituted at the school in 1797 as part of the concours, or exit examination, for potential wind, string, and percussion graduates. Students perform the solo, orchestral excerpts, and sight-reading before a jury in an attempt to win the premier prix. Composers have historically created new solos de concours, also known as morceaux de concours, or contest pieces, for specific instruments each year. Originally, instrumental professors at the Paris Conservatory composed the solos for the instruments that they taught. In 1894, flute professor Paul Taffanel initiated a programme under director Théodore Dubois in which commissioned composers created the solos. The composers then dedicated the new solos, some of which have become standard repertoire for their respective instruments, to the professor of each instrument. Nearly all conservatories in France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany eventually adopted similar assessments. However, since the late 20th century, the Paris Conservatory has only sporadically commissioned new ...