In this elegant study of the works of the undeservedly neglected composer Luigi Boccherini, Elisabeth Le Guin uses knowledge gleaned from her own playing of the cello as the keystone of her original ...approach to the relationship between music and embodiment. In analyzing the striking qualities of Boccherini's music—its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette of melancholy affects—Le Guin develops a historicized critical method based on the embodied experience of the performer. In the process, she redefines the temperament of the musical Enlightenment as one characterized by urgent, volatile inquiries into the nature of the self. A CD of sound examples, performed by the author and her string quartet, is included with the book.
Metamorphosis and the Sirena Le Guin, Elisabeth
The Journal of musicological research,
07/2021, Letnik:
40, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Cristobal Colon's "serenas" looked somewhat human; they looked not at all human. They apparently did not sing—which, if they were manatees, as commentators have suggested given the Caribbean setting, ...is not surprising. Or perhaps they did sing, and were not heard; history suggests that Colon was not a very good listener. We are talking about metamorphosis here, and instability is the point rather than taxonomical certitude. I am not the first musicologist to love the Sirens, and, the high cost notwithstanding, I suspect I will not be the last. They are peerless icons of the lability of signification, and for its rich untrustworthiness when it becomes entangled with matters of identity.
The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain. This book, the ...first major study of the tonadilla in English, examines the musical, theatrical, and social worlds that the tonadilla brought together and traces the lasting influence this genre has had on the historiography of Spanish music. The tonadillas' careful constructions of musical populism provide a window onto the tensions among Enlightenment modernity, folkloric nationalism, and the politics of representation; their diverse, engaging, and cosmopolitan music is an invitation to reexamine tired old ideas of musical "Spanishness." Perhaps most radically of all, their satirical stance urges us to embrace the labile, paratextual nature of comic performance as central to the construction of history.
In 1930 the Spanish scholar José Subirá published his monumental La tonadilla escénica, a 1,500-page, three-volume study of a comic music-theatrical genre popular on the public stages of ...Enlightenment Madrid. Recognizing the value of a shorter version for the general reader, he followed it in 1933 with a pocket-sized digest entitled La tonadilla escénica, sus obras y sus autores. This article presents a translation of the Prologue and first chapter of the latter work, still a concise, useful introduction to a genre little studied in Anglophone musicology. In an Introduction and extensive critical commentary, Subirá's scholarship is interrogated, analysed, and situated in its complex cultural context, the fraught years leading up to the Spanish Civil War.
Californian Musicology Guin, Elisabeth Le; Cayward, Margaret
The Journal of musicology (St. Joseph, Mich.),
01/2012, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Craig Russell's book makes important contributions to the study of European music as it was brought to, implemented in, and shaped by the mission communities of Alta California. This field of inquiry ...by its nature questions received notions of musical historiography, especially as it pertains to the relationship of documentary and ethnographic evidence. Documents are sparse at best for much of this music, and those that survive represent the musical traditions of the Spanish colonizers. In disciplinary terms, this translates into an interrogation of the relationship between musicology and ethnomusicology.
The authors, each representing one of these two fields, present a dialogue between the text under review and other existing work on California mission music and on the ethics and epistemology of postcolonial musicology. Further questions are duly raised about how Russell handles the great complexity of the mission situation, as regards colonial power relations, the applicability (or lack thereof) of Eurocentric historicity, and the delicate matter of representing the viewpoint of the California Indians involved in musical negotiations of culture under the mission system.
Le Guin examines Beverly Jerold and Marco Mangani's comments on the matter of smorf-, which seems to proliferate in interesting directions, when given a little attention. Among other things, the ...smorf- usage would on the whole appear to be fairly evenly distributed across the two decades of Boccherini's production represented by the Janet & Cotelle edition. Its presence in all three quintets of Opus 39 (1787) is a curious nexus; these quintets enjoy the distinction of being the only works Boccherini composed for quartet plus double bass, rather than a second cello, and according to Gerard's catalog were dedicated to the Duquesa de Osuna, for whom Boccherini was music director in 1787.
The word 'diplomacy' and its Spanish cognate diplomacia have come to refer to the unstable para- and extra-textual negotiations between textually invested powers. In this article I suggest that very ...similar negotiations can be traced through the long history of Spanish comic musical theatre, which existed in a state of perpetual tension with textual authority. My case study comes from the late end of that history: La Avellanera y dos franceses ('The Almond-seller and Two Frenchmen'), a 1767 tonadilla by Pablo Esteve. The piece presents a species of everyday, street-level 'international relations': the Almond-seller, an Andalusian woman, represents a particularly atavistic sort of proto-nationalism, while the pseudo-sophisticated Frenchmen represent a major source of Spanish cultural anxiety in the period. By using information about performance practices in the Madrid public theatres, and about the specific performers themselves, I go beyond the rudimentary and reductive information extant in the score to suggest some of the much more ambiguous negotiations that could have been enacted on the stage of the Coliseo de la Cruz in real time. This is not to say that tonadillas were ever 'diplomatic' in any political sense. Rather, they partake in the subversive yet powerless nature of all comic theatre and song: always acknowledging that vested power cannot be trusted, yet never able to change that fact. (Author abstract)
The word 'diplomacy' and its Spanish cognate diplomacia have come to refer to the unstable para- and extra-textual negotiations between textually invested powers. In this article I suggest that very ...similar negotiations can be traced through the long history of Spanish comic musical theatre, which existed in a state of perpetual tension with textual authority. My case study comes from the late end of that history: La Avellanera y dos franceses ('The Almond-seller and Two Frenchmen'), a 1767 tonadilla by Pablo Esteve. The piece presents a species of everyday, street-level 'international relations': the Almond-seller, an Andalusian woman, represents a particularly atavistic sort of proto-nationalism, while the pseudo-sophisticated Frenchmen represent a major source of Spanish cultural anxiety in the period. By using information about performance practices in the Madrid public theatres, and about the specific performers themselves, I go beyond the rudimentary and reductive information extant in the score to suggest some of the much more ambiguous negotiations that could have been enacted on the stage of the Coliseo de la Cruz in real time. This is not to say that tonadillas were ever 'diplomatic' in any political sense. Rather, they partake in the subversive yet powerless nature of all comic theatre and song: always acknowledging that vested power cannot be trusted, yet never able to change that fact.
Charles Burney and The Cunning-Man LE GUIN, ELISABETH
Eighteenth - Century Studies,
10/2010, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
... it is one of the roaring successes of the entire history of opera. On the three consecutive nights of the conference, a new production of The Cunning-Man was performed.\n (I later learned that of ...the three he is the only one without formal vocal training, which raises some interesting questions about the effect of such training on singerly diction.) The sorcery scene in act I, in which the Cunning-Man works a "spell" on Colin, involved a bubble blower, a rubber chicken, bug-eyed mugging, and various other silliness that elicited laughter to a nicely calibrated degree.
