Music History

Background in Musicology. The fundamental texts of musicology from Grosseteste to the Prakempa to Schopenhauer to Zuckerkandl imply that there is a philosophic basis to music. It was Eli Siegel in the 20 th century who explained what that basis is: "All beauty is a making one of opposites," he showed, "and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves" (1949). Opposites which are in every reality-a leaf, a person, physics itselfsuch as oneness and manyness, motion and rest are in the music of every region. The opposites make for beauty-for isn't every good song, for example a unity with rich diversity? Exciting and also composing? We show in our presentation how the Siegel Theory of Opposites meets the hope of musicology for a method at once general enough and particular enough to provide new insight into every instance of music.

The writings of Donald Francis Tovey and Eli Siegel both point to the need for a philosophic musicology. Throughout his career, Tovey wrote about art in terms of the reconciliation of opposites, and believed music, in microcosm, expressed the nature of reality. Tovey never coordinated these two concepts. Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, did-and explained: flThe world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.« This principle provides a conceptual bridge unifying every aspect of musicology. As illustration, we investigate Tovey's description of

In Aesthetic Realism, founded by Eli Siegel, a methodology exists through which biographers can understand the central ethical conflict in the life of every person: the fight between the desire to increase respect for the world and other people, or increase contempt for them. Felix Mendelssohn's life illustrates this. This paper focuses on his relations with his sister, Fanny; his teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter; and the contemporary who most deeply troubled him-Hector Berlioz. In each instance, this question arose for Mendelssohn: whether to have more feeling, or less; welcome a larger notion of real-

Chapter 17 is the most controversial section of Guido's Micrologus. Even medieval commentators were unsure of its intent. A thoughtful attempt to explain its purpose was made by van Waesberghe in his 1951 article flGuido of Arezzo and Musical Improvisation.« Guido, he argued, intended to initiate students into the art of improvisation through an innovative methodology: aligning the vowel series along definite points of the gamut.

In a 2007 article for Ongakugaku, the journal of the Musicological Society of Japan, I wrote at some length on the motivic structure of Duke Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft." 1 My purpose was to accent the "absolute" aspect of the music: to shed light on its bold compositional design. In this essay, I consider the question of the authenticity of "Harlem Air Shaft" as programmatic music. To resolve that question, it is important to have in mind the purely formal design of the composition, so I sketch it here. As I suggested in my earlier essay, "Harlem Air Shaft" has an abstract design analogous to a concrete experience: namely, reading a book. First, we meet a "Table of Contents," a series of chapter titles. These are exceedingly short. Then, the chapters arrive, fleshing out and developing the hints provided in the titles. Here is how these parallels work. First we hear a 12-bar Intro divided into three 4-bar segments-respectively in A , C, and E major. The sudden shifts of key place these short segments in sharp relief, highlighting how different they are in terms of timbre, rhythm, and melodic contour. Then, a series of 32-bar choruses follows. They are all in A , and take up-now without modulation-the musical ideas presented earlier. Chorus I develops the first segment of the Intro; Chorus II, the second; Chorus III, the third; and-to round it off-Chorus IV (the "shout chorus") develops the opening four measures of Chorus I. Thus, the opening 16 measures of the composition, considered as four separate 4-bar units, are the "titles," and foreshadow the main "chapters" of the work as a whole. Nothing in all of previous jazz composition compares to this audacious structural plan. To go even further: among the European classics, perhaps only Beethoven's Op. 133, the Grosse Fuge, presages it. Yet unlike Beethoven's masterpiece for string quartet, for which no programmatic content has ever been suggested, "Harlem Air Shaft" is perhaps the Ellington piece most frequently thought of in programmatic terms. And for good reason-among all of Ellington's works for which we have a direct programmatic statement from the composer, this particular "story" has been reprinted more than any other.

How did the mind of Adolf Hitler come to be so evil? This is a question which has been asked for decades – a question which millions of people have thought had no clear answer. This has been the case equally with persons who dedicated their lives to scholarship in the field. For example, Alan Bullock, author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, and perhaps the most famous of the biographers of the Nazi leader, is cited in Ron Rosenbaum’s 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, as saying: “The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain” (in Rosenbaum 1998, vii). In the same text, philosopher Emil Fackenheim agrees: “The closer one gets to explicability the more one realizes nothing can make Hitler explicable” (in Rosenbaum 1998, vii). 1 Even an author as keenly perceptive and ethically bold as the Swiss philosopher Max Picard confesses in his 1947 book, Hitler in Ourselves, that ultimately he is faced with a mystery. 2 The very premise of his book is that somehow the mind of Hitler m...

There is a new laudatory trend in books being published on blues and its more commercial counterpart, rhythm and blues. The field for the last few decades has been almost the exclusive preserve of record collectors and true believers, who tended to write with a fan's enthusiasm and a fan's dedication to unearthing all the facts about the subject that could be found. Thus, we presently have many bookcases-worth of terrifically researched books, delineating the history of blues/rhythm and blues, but what has largely been lacking in them are evocative writing and a sense that the author has bothered to actually make sense of the subject in an analytical way. Until now, that is. An excellent example of this new trend is Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo (2003), an examination of soul music that is built wholly on the R&B research of his predecessors but which exudes vigorous prose and a compelling thesis. Another book reflecting this trend is Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta (2004), an insightful examination of Robert Johnson and the country blues, which not only possesses great writing and wonderful analytical conclusions, but also brings to the table original research.

From 1987 to 1994, Zhou Long composed in a manner he declared 'Buddhist'. A work that exemplifies this period-and its aesthetic preoccupations-is the quintet Dhyana. This article investigates that work in close technical detail, exploring how key concepts inherent in the term 'dhyana' are reflected in the music. Most centrally, 'dhyana' implies the oneness of concentration of thought and expansion of consciousness-and concentration and expansion prove to be primary opposites in Zhou Long's compositional technique. Buddhism (especially Chan Buddhism) asserts the inseparability of these opposites. So does the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, in whom Zhou Long has had an abiding interest. And so does Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy of the arts founded by Eli Siegel, which serves as the methodological framework for this article. Central to Aesthetic Realism is Siegel's statement: 'In reality opposites are one, art shows this'.

A contextualized history of the San Francisco Bay Area as a welcoming and nurturing environment for Black Concert and Opera Singers from the turn of the 20th Century to the present day.  Viewing Artistry vs Skin Color as the determinant in the era of Jim Crow and Segregation