H-Music: Reviewed Elsewhere
Celia Applegate. The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. xii + 402 pp. $39.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-487-52048-9.
For over twenty years, Celia Applegate has maintained that historians need to study music. Her latest book, The Necessity of Music, contains fourteen previously published essays that collectively demonstrate why. These newly edited essays offer nuanced historical explorations of the relationship between music and German nationalism, a topic that has garnered increasing attention. Applegate leads a cross-disciplinary band of
Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World. 2015. Produced by Maria Sonevytsky in association with The Center for Traditional Music and Dance and The Yara Arts Group. Annotated by Maria Sonevytsky with Yevhen Yefremov. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, CD (1), SFW CD 50420.
The Chornobyl Songs Project, released by Smithsonian Folkways, is a musical project under the direction of ethnomusicologist Yevhen Yefremov of the Kyiv Academy of Music and performed by a New York-based choir, Ensemble Hilka (meaning "Branch"). The material is based on the folk songs that may have been sung
R. James Arnold. Musical Debate and Political Culture in France, 1700–1830. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017. vi + 232 pp. £65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-7832-7201-3.
Emily H. Green and Catherine Mayes, eds. Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017. vii + 255 pp. £80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5804-6577-9.
Taken together, these two books make a significant contribution to our understanding of the place of music within that now long-standing theme in eighteenth-century history, the rise of the ‘public sphere’. Both works take music as
Simon Morrison. Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today. London: 4th Estate (HarperCollins), 2016. xxix + 507 pp. £20.00.
Echoing the title of James Ellroy’s famous 1992 crime novel L.A. Confidential, Simon Morrison promises the low-down on the thuggery, feuds and scandals among the graceful sylphs and ballerinos of Moscow’s ballet. ...
... Morrison goes back to 1776, the Bolshoi Ballet’s very beginning, and, since the company was cast in the image of Russia, the beginning of all the murky skulduggery. Hereafter, he compresses the ballet’s 240
Rebecca Rossen. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 336 pp. & companion website (www.oup.com/us/dancingjewish), $115.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-199-79176-7; $31.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-199-79177-4.
Dance is a performing, visual, and kinesthetic art, so analyses of the form intersect with a range of fields. However, in the realm of Jewish studies, relevant research, although it has expanded in recent years, continues to lag behind studies devoted to other genres, both in the number of scholars engaging in the area
Susan Rutherford. Verdi, Opera, Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xii + 293 pp. £67.00 (cover), ISBN 978-1-107-04382-4.
Many are the themes and human relationships scrutinized by Susan Rutherford in Verdi, Opera, Women—sisterhood, owing to its lack of operatic treatment, is one of the few that falls outside the project. Rutherford's book was inspired by the award of the biannual "Giuseppe Verdi" International Prize of the Parma Rotary Club and has resulted in an extremely rich survey of sentiments and experiences that formed part of the life of nineteenth-century women (with a
Benjamin R. Teitelbaum. Lions of the North: sounds of the new Nordic radical nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xv + 210 pp., $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-1902-1259-9; $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-1902-1260-5.
Benjamin Teitelbaum's Lions of the North is an unflinching assessment of modern Nordic radical nationalism seen through the lens of its fragmented musical affinities, subsequent to the decline of the white power punk scene that once unified it as a cultural space. In privileging the views of radical nationalists the book provides the reader a unique vantage point that
Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 274 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-28233-9.
Todd Decker's Hymns for the Fallen ... explores film and television as sites for the memorialisation, celebration, and (to a certain extent) critique of US military culture ... and ... examines the role of music and sound in contributing to that work. In so doing, the book chooses to examine a subgenre of war film that Decker identifies and designates the Prestige Combat Film—or PCF as it quickly becomes. These are post
Nicolas Pillai. Jazz as Visual Language. London: I.B.Tauris, 2017. xi + 176 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78453-344-1.
Both film and jazz were new forms of cultural and artistic expression in the twentieth century, and both also displayed (and continue to display) enormous variety in forms and styles. In recent years, the interplay between film and jazz has caught attention in film studies as well as in the so-called new jazz studies. Nicolas Pillai ... combines both angles in this book.
As a premise, Pillai states that jazz has always been insistently visual: from live performances and the
Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, eds. Silence and Absence in Literature and Music. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016. 266 pp.
This volume focusses on the rarely discussed reverse side of traditional, ‘given’ objects of studies, namely absence rather than presence (of text) and silence rather than sound (of music). ...
The twelve contributors ... cover for example the question to what extent absence can become significant in the first place and iconic (silent) functions of musical scores to discussions of fields ranging from baroque opera to John Cage’s 4’33’’.
The essays ... are of relevance to