(b Verdello, Sept 14, 1898; d Bergamo, Jan 22, 1981). Italian music critic. He took a diploma in composition at the Turin Conservatory (1929) and studied musicology with Cesari. His career as a critic was centred in Milan; after working on Secolo sera (1928–34), he succeeded Cesari at Corriere della sera, remaining there until his retirement (1973). In 1949 he founded the monthly journal La scala, which he edited until its closure in 1963; he was particularly interested in opera, especially its authentic performance. Abbiati also published a history of music in five volumes (1939–46), which he later updated and revised in four volumes (1967–8). This was well received, although (being the work of a single author) it was inevitably incomplete; the comments in the second edition on 20th-century composers, notably Italian composers of Abbiati’s own generation, are especially valuable as a contemporary response. His four-volume work on Verdi (...
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Abbiati, Franco
Carolyn Gianturco
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Abraham, Otto
Israel J. Katz
(b Berlin, May 30, 1872; d Berlin, Jan 24, 1926). German physician and psychologist. He graduated in medicine at Berlin University in 1894, and thereafter dedicated himself primarily to psychoacoustics and the physiology of music. From 1896 to 1905 he was assistant professor under Carl Stumpf at the Psychological Institute of Berlin University (which in 1905 became the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv). In 1900, when Hornbostel joined the staff, Abraham and Stumpf recorded on wax cylinders a visiting Siamese court orchestra – the first German attempt to record non-Western music. Abraham also recorded music from South Africa in the same year. In 1901 he published an article on absolute pitch which later (1906) resulted in a polemic between him and Auerbach. Adopting Stumpf's methods, Abraham and Hornbostel entered into a collaboration which laid the foundation for comparative musicology; he also collaborated with the physiologist and otologist K.L. Schaefer (...
Article
Quṭb al-Dīn
Owen Wright
[Maḥmūd ibn Mas‘ūd al-Shīrāzī]
(b Shiraz, 1236; d Tabriz, 1311). Persian physician and scientist. The most outstanding pupil of the mathematician Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, he is particularly known for his work in medicine, optics and astronomy. His encyclopedia, Durrat al-tāj (‘Pearl of the crown’) demonstrates his mastery of the whole range of traditional medieval scholarship, and contains within its treatment of the mathematical sciences (quadrivium) a lengthy section on music. This is mainly a restatement of the musical theory developed by Ṣafī al-Dīn, but is important for its attention to musical practice, particularly in its codification and description of modes and rhythmic cycles. In both areas it points to the existence of a wider range of structures than is apparent from the works of Ṣafī al-Dīn; its treatment of the modes in particular is far fuller, and is less restricted by purely theoretical concerns. It ends with the most extended, complex and precise example of notation to be found in the works of the medieval Arab and Persian theorists, a unique document which allows some insight into the nature of the compositional practice of the period with regard not only to formal, modal and rhythmic strategies but also to techniques of text setting....
Article
Alberti, Leon Battista
Charles E. Brewer
(b Genoa, Feb 14, 1404; d Rome, April 3, 1472). Italian humanist, architect and writer. His formal studies began at the gymnasium of Gasparino Barzizza at Padua, where he became friends with Tommaso Parentucelli (later Pope Nicholas V). He went to Bologna, probably in 1421, to study law but became increasingly interested in mathematics, and met the polymath Paolo Toscanelli. In 1431, Alberti joined the Papal civil service in Rome, becoming Papal inspector of monuments (1447–55). He held various ecclesiastical posts, becoming successively prior of S Martino in Gangalandi at Signa, near Florence, rector of Borgo San Lorenzo and canon of Florence Cathedral.
Early in his career, Alberti was influenced by Filippo Brunelleschi, to whom he dedicated the De pictura (1435). While in Rome, Alberti expanded his knowledge of classical architecture and sculpture through his survey of the city's monuments (Descriptio urbis Romae...
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Alcaraz, José Antonio
Ricardo Miranda Pérez
(b Mexico City, Dec 5, 1938). Mexican musicologist, writer and critic. He studied at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música under Armando Montiel, Esperanza Pulido and José Pablo Moncayo. He was also a pupil of Otto Mayer-Serra. At the beginning of his career he dedicated himself to composition, which led him to take courses at the Paris Conservatoire as well as spending time in Darmstadt, Venice and London, where he took instruction from Daniel Lesur, Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna and Pierre Wissmer. Among his most important compositions are works for stage and film, which have earned him several prizes. Nevertheless, his most important work is in the fields of criticism and research, although his valuable contributions in the fields of theatre and opera production must also be remembered. As a critic, Alcaraz has played a fundamental role in making diverse repertories known in Mexico, ranging from ancient to contemporary music. He has insistently disseminated and analysed the Mexican repertory, particularly that of the 20th century. His knowledge, combined with a keen sense of humour and a stance legendary for being radical and uncompromising, has made him into one of the most authoritative and recognized critical voices in Mexico and Latin America. As a musicologist, Alcaraz has occupied himself with the discussion and assessment of the Mexican school of the 20th century. His works on composers such as Carlos Chávez, Rodolfo Halffter and José Pablo Moncayo are fundamental, as are his numerous essays on authors such as Rolón, Carillo, Huízar, Revueltas, Sandi, Galindo Dimas, Enríquez and Estrada. As a music critic, he has written for over 20 years (since ...
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Alió y Brea, Francisco
Jocelyne Aubé
(b Barcelona, March 27, 1862; d Barcelona, March 31, 1908). Spanish composer, folklorist and music critic. He studied composition with Antonio Nicolau and Anselmo Barba and piano with C.G. Vidiella in Barcelona and was music critic for various journals there, including La renaixensa, L'avenç and, from 1905 to 1908, El poble català. He published his Collecció de 6 melodies per a cant i piano and five Cansons per cant i piano (both Barcelona, 1887), which are settings of poems by Angel Guimerá, Francisco Matheu y Fornells, Apeles Mestres and Jacinto Verdaguer. He illustrated the latter volume himself, and some of his work was displayed at an exhibition of the Sociedad de Acuarelistas in Barcelona. A distinguished folklorist as well as a sensitive composer and skilful melodist, he collected Catalan folksongs and published arrangements of 23 of these in Cansons populars catalanas (Barcelona, 1891). He used native rhythms and melodies in his songs and piano pieces (among them ...
Article
Ambros, August Wilhelm
Philipp Naegele
(b Mauth [now Vysoké Mýto], Nov 17, 1816; d Vienna, June 28, 1876). Austrian music historian and critic. His mother, sister of the musicologist Kiesewetter, fostered his love of music, painting and architecture; the performance of older music in the Kiesewetter home belonged to Ambros’s strongest early impressions. He acquired a musical training, despite his father’s objections, through a keen enthusiasm, an exceptional memory and an unbounded capacity for work. A humanistic Gymnasium education, a doctorate of law completed in 1839 at Prague University and vast reading, with a youthful predilection for Jean Paul, underlay his later scholarship and influenced his prolix style. Robert Schumann was his spiritual and journalistic model, and as ‘Flamin’ he associated with enthusiastic young followers, including Hanslick as ‘Renatus’, in a Bohemian branch of the ‘Davidsbund’ to fight musical conservatism in Prague. He was indebted more to the concepts and methods of art historians and historians of antiquity, of law and of literature, than to such musical colleagues as Kiesewetter or Fétis....
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Andrés, Juan
Robert Stevenson
[Andres, Giovanni]
(b Planes, Alicante, Feb 15, 1740; d Rome, Jan 12, 1817). Spanish literary historian and music critic. He was professed in the Society of Jesus on 24 December 1754 and studied at Tarragona, Manresa, Gerona and Valencia from 1754 until 1763, when he was ordained a priest. Four years later, while teaching rhetoric and poetry at the University of Gandía, he was exiled with the rest of the Spanish Jesuits. He went first to Corsica, then to Italy, where he taught philosophy at Ferrara until 1773. After Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuits in 1773 Andrés devoted himself to letters and bibliography, living three years with the Bianchi at Mantua, and then travelling throughout Italy and in 1794 to Vienna. During his travels he maintained a correspondence with his brother Carlos, which was published from 1786 to 1794. The work contains much valuable material on music, particularly the third volume, which deals with Venetian conservatories, singers, opera and Greek-rite chant in ...
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Andropediacus, Lycosthenes Psellionoros
Lini Hübsch-Pfleger
[Spangenberg, Wolfhart]
(b Mansfeld, probably before 1570; d Buchenbach, nr Freiburg, before Oct 1636). German theologian and writer. The first two names of his pseudonym are equivalents of Wolfhart Spangenberg, his original name, and Andropediacus derives from the name of his birthplace. He was the son of Cyriac and grandson of Johann Spangenberg. His father having been obliged to leave his position as court preacher at Mansfeld in 1574 because he supported Matthias Flaccius's substantialist view of Original Sin, he spent his earliest years at, among other places, Strasbourg, from 1578, and Schlitz, near Fulda, from 1581 and came under his father's influence in theological and artistic matters. He matriculated at Tübingen University on 5 April 1586 and took the bachelor's degree in 1588 and master's degree in 1591. He too was an adherent of Flaccianism, which hindered his career as a theologian. In 1595 he followed his father to Strasbourg, where he gained citizenship and earned his living as a proofreader. In ...
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Arellano, Juan Salvador Bautista de
Almonte Howell
(b Seville; fl 1628–33). Spanish writer. He was a member of the Trinitarian order in Seville. Between 1628 and 1633 he wrote several pseudo-historical works on local and religious topics as well as one pertaining to music: El psalterio de David: exortación, y virtudes de la música, y canto, para todo género de gentes, en particular para los eclesiásticos, y obligación que tienen de cantar, o rezar las divinas alabanzas con toda atención, y devoción (Jerez de la Frontera, 1632). This is a curious mixture of legend and history. The first part traces music from classical and biblical times up to and including the medieval period, the second treats of its various uses, not only religious but also military, social, educational and recreational. Arellano mingled ancient fable with contemporary anecdote and drew fanciful analogies between the realms of music and religion. His book is of particular interest as a compendium of the kind of material used in the traditional ‘praise of music’ (...
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Asaf′yev, Boris Vladimirovich
Larisa Georgievna Danko
[Glebov, Igor′]
(b St Petersburg, 17/July 29, 1884; d Moscow, Jan 27, 1949). Russian musicologist, composer and critic. He studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory from 1904 to 1910 with Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov, and graduated in 1908 from the faculty of history and philology of the University of St Petersburg. From 1910 he worked as a repetiteur; from 1916 edited and composed ballet music and from 1919 was a member of the board of directors and repertory consultant at the Mariinsky and Mikhaylovsky Theatres. In 1919 he became head of the Central Library for State Musical Theatres. In the same year, in association with Lyapunov and Bulich, he organized the music department at the Petrograd Institute for the History of the Arts (now the Zubov Institute for the History of the Arts); he was its director from 1921. Between 1922 and 1925 he was responsible for the organization there of concerts of contemporary music. He was made a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory in ...
Article
Bar-Am, Benjamin
Ronit Seter
[Berman, Bernhardt]
(b Wiesbaden, July 20, 1923). Israeli critic, composer and musicologist. He moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1936. After studying composition with Paul Ben-Haim, his most influential teacher, Bar-Am attended the Ecole Normale de Paris (1949–51). He studied musicology at Tel-Aviv University (BA 1977), where he became the principal lecturer for courses on Jewish music and Israeli contemporary music (1973–96) and the first director of the Archive of Israeli Music. The secretary general of the Israeli League of Composers (1960–76, 1976–8), he became chair of the organizing committee of the ISCM in Israel in 1980. Though most influential as the music critic of the Jerusalem Post between 1958 and 1995, Bar-Am also wrote many essays on Israeli music in Hebrew, English and German, notably ‘A Musical Gateway between East and West’ (Jerusalem Post, 20 April 1988). He ceased composing in the early 1970s but resumed in ...
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Barbieri, Francisco Asenjo
John Edwin Henken
(b Madrid, Aug 3, 1823; d Madrid, Feb 17, 1894). Spanish composer, musicologist, conductor and critic. Barbieri’s father died in 1823 and the composer used his matronym throughout his life although, in the heated polemic wars of the period, that was sometimes held against him as an Italianate pretence.
Barbieri received his early music training from his maternal grandfather and entered the fledgling Royal Conservatory in 1837, studying the clarinet with Ramón Broca, the piano with Albéniz y Basanta, singing with Saldoni and composition with Carnicer. In 1841 his family moved to Lucena, but Barbieri remained in Madrid, eking out a living as a clarinettist, pianist, teacher and copyist. His earliest compositions were songs and dances, and a paso doble for a militia band in which he played. He also sang baritone roles in Italian operas at the Conservatory and the Teatro del Circo. He wrote the libretto for a one-act zarzuela but did not complete the music in time for its scheduled première in ...
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Baretti, Giuseppe
Iain Fenlon
(Marc’Antonio)
(b Turin, April 25, 1719; d Marylebone, London, May 5, 1789). Italian man of letters. His Fetonte sulle rive del Po was set by G.A. Giai (1750, Turin). In January 1751 he left Italy, where he had a considerable literary reputation, for an appointment at the Italian Opera in London. Shortly after his arrival he wrote two facetious pamphlets relating to a dispute between the actors and the lessee of the Opera. He adapted selected odes of Horace as a sort of Masonic oratorio. Seeking a composer able to avoid the vocal clichés and long ritornellos of Italian opera and ‘to temper alternately the solemnity of church music with the brilliancy of the theatrical’, Baretti chose Philidor, with whom he discussed ‘every syllable … with respect to the best way of expressing musically the meaning of Horace’. Carmen saeculare was performed in London in 1779 and in Paris the year after. Baretti wrote in his copy of Johnson’s ...
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Bartholin, Caspar the Younger
[Caspar Bartholin Secundus ]
(b Copenhagen, Sept 10, 1655; d ?Copenhagen, June 11, 1738). Danish anatomist, doctor of medicine, and polymath. Scion of a famous family of doctors and natural philosophers, he began medical studies with his father in 1671 and three years later was appointed professor of philosophy by King Christian IV. He then travelled for several years, and working in Paris with the anatomist Joseph Guichard Duverney, he first described ‘Bartholin’s glands’ in a cow. Returning to Copenhagen, he took up medical practice and taught medicine and anatomy. In 1678 his father conferred on him the doctorate in medicine. Among his writings on various scientific subjects, in De tibiis veterum, et earum antiquo usu libri tres (Amsterdam, 1677, 1679) he discussed the wind instruments of antiquity. Like many of his publications this one was based mostly on previous authors’ work rather than first-hand research, but it was influential, for example being cited uncritically by Filippo Bonanni (...
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Barzun, Jacques
David Trippett
(b Créteil, France, Nov 30, 1907; d San Antonio, TX, October 25, 2012). Cultural historian, critic, and teacher of French birth. Born into the artistic environs of French modernism, he wrote widely on Western culture and its documents, founding the discipline of cultural history at Columbia University, where he spent his academic career.
After leaving France for America in 1920, he attended Columbia University (BA 1927, PhD 1932) where he lectured on contemporary civilization from 1927, becoming assistant professor (1937), professor (1945), Seth Low Professor of History (1955), Provost (1958–67), and University Professor (1967–75). He also served as president of the American Academy of Arts (1972–5, 1977–8), and was made an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University in 1960.
Barzun regarded culture as a fabric of interwoven ideas which historians should trace through time, and between which exist a series of links: “because culture is a web of many strands; none is spun by itself, nor is any cut off at a fixed date.” He viewed music through the prism of a broader culture, typified in the scope of ...
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Belyayev, Viktor Mikhaylovich
Yury Keldïsh
revised by Iosif Genrikhovich Rayskin
(b Uralsk region, Feb 6, 1888; d Moscow, Feb 16, 1968). Russian musicologist, folksong scholar and music critic. He graduated in 1914 in composition from the Petrograd Conservatory, where he had studied with Glazunov, Lyadov and Jāzeps Vītols. Having joined the staff of the conservatory the previous year, he was appointed senior lecturer in 1916 and professor of theory in 1919. After the October Revolution he participated in the work of various state musical organizations, and in 1922, after moving to Moscow, he was elected a member of the Academy of Artistic Sciences. During the 1920s he was an active figure in the Association for Contemporary Music, whose journal Sovremennaya muzïka (‘Contemporary Music’) he edited together with V.V. Derzhanovsky and L.L. Sabaneyev. He also pursued a wide range of activities as a music critic, writing for Soviet and foreign publications. Belyayev taught at the Moscow Conservatory (1938–40...
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Bernelinus
Michel Huglo
(fl Paris, late 10th and early 11th centuries). French mathematician. According to two late manuscripts used by Gerbert, he compiled a mathematical treatise, Prefacio libri abaci quem junior Bernelinus edidit Parisius ( I-Rvat lat.4539, f.1; see GerbertS, i, Praefatio, no.X; RISM, B/III/2, 1968, p.95). The treatise claims to be based on the doctrine of Gerbert d’Aurillac (d 1003) and can thus be dated to the late 10th or early 11th century. A musical treatise (GerbertS, i, 312–30; PL, cli, 651–74) is ascribed to Bernelinus in only one manuscript, I-Rvat Regin.lat.1661 (see RISM, B/III/2, p.119). It comprises two sections; the first, Dimidium proslambenomenos (GerbertS, i, 312), sometimes appears, anonymously, separately from the second, Rogatus a pluribus (GerbertS, i, 314), as for example in GB-Lbl Harl.3199, f.69v (RISM, B/III/4, 1992, p.82) and I-CEc S.XXVI.1, f.177v; and, according to Smits van Waesberghe, Berno (...
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Bilstein [Bilstenius], Johannes
Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller
(b Ober- or Niedermarsberg, c1560; d after 1595). German writer and theologian. During his youth he lived for a time at Emden and in 1581 matriculated at the University of Marburg, but in 1582 he transferred to Rostock, where he studied with David Chyträus. He was again living at Marburg in 1587. In 1588 he matriculated at the University of Basle, where on 15 May 1593 he became a doctor of theology. He gave some lectures at Kassel in 1590. Between 1584 and 1596 he published numerous learned books on grammar, rhetoric and so on, among them Syntagma Philippo-Rameum artium liberalium (Basle, 1588, 2/1596), which includes a chapter on music (‘De musica’, 355–60). In this book, which he wrote for a private pupil at Marburg in ten weeks in 1587, he steered a middle course – as its title suggests – between the views of Philipp Melanchthon and Petrus Ramus. In the chapter on music he subscribed to Ramus’s definition ‘Musica est ars bene canendi’ as well as to the rules for ligatures set out by Friedrich Beurhaus, whose ...
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Blesh, Rudi
John Edward Hasse
[Rudolph] (Pickett)
(b Guthrie, OK, Jan 21, 1899; d Gilmanton, NH, Aug 25, 1985). American writer on music. He attended Dartmouth College and earned the BS in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1940s he served as jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote a pioneering serious history of jazz, Shining Trumpets (1946), and with Harriet Janis was co-author of the first history of ragtime, They All Played Ragtime (1950). The latter work established him as the leading authority in this field, and eventually prompted a revival of the music. Also with Janis, he founded Circle Records, a small but significant jazz label which became the first to issue the Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton. In 1953 they sold Circle Records – apart from the Morton recordings – to Jazzology Records. From 1947 to 1950...