Music Criticism and Journalism

The first book-length work of general musical literature published in the USA was probably John Rowe Parker’s A Musical Biography or Sketches of the Lives and Writings of Eminent Musical Characters, Interspersed with an Epitome of Interesting Musical Matter (Boston, 1824). His The Euterpiad, or Musical Intelligencer (1820–23) was the city’s first musical periodical. Dwight’s Journal of Music (1852–81) covered local, national and international musical issues. Dwight and other early 19th-century Boston-based writers promoted abstract instrumental music’s elevation from mere entertainment to a vehicle of moral enrichment and led America in establishing high-art idealism and the classical canon.

The Ditson firm, which published Dwight’s Journal from 1868 and then several lesser journals, also published important books. Near the end of the 19th century L.C. Page began to publish some handsome editions of books by the Elsons, Lahee and Rupert Hughes. From 1872 Boston’s first woman journalist to write on musical issues, Sallie White, regularly reported in the ...

Member of Fawcett family

(bap. Bradford, May 16, 1807; d Low Moor, Yorks., Dec 21, 1864). English writer. He was the son of Richard Fawcett (b 1778), a Bradford worsted manufacturer. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, was ordained in 1830, and in 1833 became perpetual curate of Holy Trinity, Wibsey. Later he was domestic chaplain to Lord Dunsany and from ...

The present article provides a general account of musical periodicals and their history; it is supplemented by a comprehensive list of musical periodicals, arranged by continent and country, with an alphabetical index. Periodical editions of music are presented in a separate section.

In this article, dates given normally represent first and last volumes or, in certain special cases, issues; dates given with an oblique stroke (e.g. 1971/2) refer to a volume beginning in one year and ending in another. Fuller information on title changes and on breaks in a periodical’s run will be found in the list section below.

Periodicals are publications appearing at regular (or sometimes irregular) intervals and, normally, furnished with serial numbers indicating annual volumes. They primarily contain such material as essays, reports, critiques and news items. In addition to their periodical mode of publication they have in common with newspapers an intention of continuance, an approach determined by publisher or editor, an objective of variety of content and to some extent contemporary relevance. In music, the concept of the periodical also includes yearbooks, annual reports and the proceedings of institutions, almanacs on music and similarly orientated publications; works published in fascicles (part-works, serials etc.) are to be distinguished from periodicals proper....

(b Zwickau, Saxony, June 8, 1810; d Endenich, nr Bonn, July 29, 1856). German composer and music critic. While best remembered for his piano music and songs, and some of his symphonic and chamber works, Schumann made significant contributions to all the musical genres of his day and cultivated a number of new ones as well. His dual interest in music and literature led him to develop a historically informed music criticism and a compositional style deeply indebted to literary models. A leading exponent of musical Romanticism, he had a powerful impact on succeeding generations of European composers.

The fifth and last child of August Schumann and Johanna Christiana Schumann (née Schnabel), Robert Schumann was born into a household dominated by literary activity. (There is no evidence for a middle name ‘Alexander’, given in some sources; his birth and death certificates both give ‘Robert Schumann’. Possibly Alexander is a corruption of his teenage pseudonym ‘Skülander’.) His father, an author of chivalric romances and a tireless lexicographer, amassed a small fortune by translating Walter Scott and Byron into German. He was also a book dealer, and Robert, his favourite child, was able to spend many hours poring over the classics of literature....

Two lines of inquiry have developed in recent years which might be described as ‘sociology of opera’, though neither has as yet run to much of the quantitative study characteristic of sociology as a modern academic discipline.

The first is concerned with the inner workings of opera as a genre and of particular operas. It asks what these tell us about social relations in the cultures from which opera (or particular operas) sprang: opera, it assumes, is a revealing witness because, in the elaboration of the artistic means brought to bear on it, the genre lends itself to embodying projections of the fears, desires and conflicts at work within society. Inquiries of this kind have so far been few. Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen has called up several, the best-known being the still controversial essays by Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann and Theodor Adorno: this is hardly surprising, since the Ring...