Current Table of Contents

• Monteverdi, Marenzio, and Battista Guarini's 'Cruda Amarilli'
  

  Claudio Monteverdi's choice of Cruda Amarilli to open his fifth book of madrigals (1605) is most obviously related to the book's narrative design, which it initiates as a dialogue, followed by O Mirtillo, but it also serves to highlight the importance of one of the works most criticized by Giovanni Maria Artusi after he heard the piece in Ferrara in 1598. When compared with settings of the same text by Benedetto Pallavicino and Giaches de Wert, Cruda Amarilli also aligns Monteverdi with Marenzio's setting of the same text in his seventh book for five voices (1595). Monteverdi's choice of model has greater significance in the light of other works published in the fifth book, which have texts in common with Marenzio's seventh; also significant is the narrative organization of the seventh book, which I argue Monteverdi took as a starting point for that of the fifth.

  The strong association Monteverdi sought to establish with Marenzio's work, and the apparently deliberate rejection of the Mantuan models it implies, is consistent with his attempt to present himself as a cosmopolitan composer, who, like the older master, is comfortable with contemporary literary culture, and in particular with the discussions surrounding Guarini's Il pastor fido. It also reflects his intense interest in the late 1590s in the progressive activity of the Ferrarese court of Alfonso II. Indeed, the ridotto at Antonio Goretti's house where Artusi heard Cruda Amarilli and other Monteverdi madrigals, all on Pastor fido texts, may have been devoted entirely to such discussions, centred around the play and Monteverdi's settings exclusively. They were probably modelled on similar evenings at the home of Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, Marenzio's patron in the early 1590s, at which Guarini himself had been a guest. Monteverdi's ultimate purpose, in the aftermath of Alfonso's death, may have been to position himself as worthy of the succession to the post of maestro di cappella at Mantua, for which he was passed over in 1596 in favour of Pallavicino.

• Ralph, Adeline, and Ursula Vaughan Williams: Some Facts and Speculation (with a Note about Tippett)
  

  In conversations that took place between 1986 and 1994 Ursula Vaughan Williams told the author that she and Vaughan Williams had become lovers soon after they first met, in 1938. She did not believe that Ralph's crippled wife Adeline had ever suspected this; in any case the two women became friends, despite Ursula's jealousy of Adeline who, she realized, still occupied a place in Ralph's life and affections that could not be challenged. The author attempts to sort out rumours about the effect on Adeline of the death of her cousin Stella Duckworth, to whom she was very close, which occurred at the time of her engagement in 1897. The background to an offer of marriage that Ursula said she had received from Tippett not long after Ralph's death is also explored.

• Instrumental Arias or Sonic Tableaux: 'Voice' in Haydn's String Quartets Opp. 9 and 17
  

  The reception of Haydn's early string quartets is chequered. Professional performers tend to avoid the quartets before Op. 20 (1772). In scholarship, essential features of ‘Classical’ string quartets are typically thought to be in place at the earliest with Op. 20, but more usually with Op. 33. This essay contributes to a critique of these assumptions, and offers an alternative view of the earlier works. The slow movements in particular, with their solo ‘arias’ for first violin, have been considered especially problematic. From a historical perspective, however, these movements can be understood to exemplify a fundamentally new mode of expression that was extolled by mid-eighteenth-century theorists: that of the tableau. This concept was discussed, for example, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, and was brought to the stages of Vienna and Eszterháza in the ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre and the operas of Gluck and Haydn, among others. As sonic tableaux, or instrumental ‘arias’, movements from Haydn's early string quartets epitomize a dramatic mode that was of fundamental importance to music of the Classical era.

• In Havana and Paris: The Musical Activities of Alejo Carpentier
  

  One of the major figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was closely involved with members of the musical, as well as literary, avant-garde during his creative apprenticeship in the inter-war years. Placed as much between the vocations of music and literature as between the cultures of Europe and Latin America, he mounted the first concerts of new music in 1920s Havana, established himself by writing music criticism, and engaged in several musical collaborations with his compatriots Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla. After being forced to flee Havana owing to his political activities and the repressive policies of Machado's dictatorship, Carpentier established himself in Paris, where he became associated with an impressively wide circle of composers, including Varèse, Villa-Lobos, Milhaud, and the now little known Marius-François Gaillard. He was also acquainted with Carlos Chávez and knew Jolivet through Varèse. Involving himself in further musical collaborations during his eleven-year residence in Paris (1928–39), a creative cross-fertilization took place between Carpentier and the composers with whom he shared both friendship and artistic kinship.

• Whose Phenomenology of Music? David Huron's Theory of Expectation
  
• Vaughan Williams Essays. Ed. by Byron Adams and Robin Wells.
  
• Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music. Ed. by Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton.
  
• Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. By Brian Robins.
  
• Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style. By Michael Spitzer.
  
• Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work. Ed. by Karen Painter and Thomas Crow.
  
• The Reception of Bach's Organ Works from Mendelssohn to Brahms. By Russell Stinson.
  
• Nationale Musik im 20. Jahrhundert. Kompositorische und soziokulturelle Aspekte der Musikgeschichte zwischen Ost- und Westeuropa. Konferenzbericht Leipzig 2002. Ed. by Helmut Loos and Stefan Keym.
  
• Le Juif errant, paroles d'E. Scribe et d'H. V. de Saint-Georges, musique de F. Halevy: Un grand opera francais au debut du Second Empire. By Beatrice Prioron-Pinelli.
  
• Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism. By Mary E. Davis.
  
• Deodat de Severac ou Le Chantre du Midi. By Catherine Buser Picard.
  
• Leo Delibes, Jean de Nivelle: Dossier de presse parisienne (1880). Edited by Pauline Girard and Berengere de l'Epine.
  
• Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914): Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges. Ed. by Michael Fend and Michel Noiray.
  
• Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity. By Daniel M. Grimley.
  
• Libretto im Progress: Brechts und Weills Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny aus textgeschichtlicher Sicht. By Esbjorn Nystrom.
  
• Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. By Charles Youmans.
  
• Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat: A Facsimile of the Sketches. Ed. by Maureen A. Carr. * Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces: Study Score, Scenes choregraphiques russes avec chant et musique composees par Igor Stravinsky. Ed. by Margarita Mazo and Millan Sachania.
  
• Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953. By Kiril Tomoff.
  
• After Sibelius: Studies in Finnish Music. By Tim Howell.
  
• Um das Spatwerk betrogen? Prokofjews letze Schaffensperiode. Ed. by Ernst Kuhn.
  
• Deutsche Leitkultur Musik? Zur Musikgeschichte nach dem Holocaust. Ed. by Albrecht Riethmuller.
  
• Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music. By Ben Johnston and ed. by Bob Gilmore.
  
• Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of its Elements and Structure. By Ton de Leeuw.
  
• Essays from the Third International Schenker Symposium. Ed. by Allen Cadwallader. * Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach (Second Edition). By Allen Cadwallader and David Gagne.
  
• Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics. By Edward Rothstein.
  
• Music Analysis East and West. Ed. by Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field.
  
• Mozart's Piano Music. By William Kinderman.
  
• Singing in Style: A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices. By Martha Elliott.
  
• Handel's Operas 1726-1741. By Winton Dean.
  
• The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By Giulia Nuti.
  
• Le Plaisir musical en France au XVIIe siecle. Ed. by Thierry Favier and Manuel Couvreur.
  
• Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres. By Daniel Albright.
  
• Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore. By Marica S. Tacconi.
  
• Les Manuscrits du processional, i: Autriche a Espagne. Ed. by Michel Huglo. * Les Manuscrits du processional, ii: France a Afrique du Sud. Ed. by Michel Huglo.
  
• The Westrup Prize
  
• Recipients of 'Music & Letters' Awards
  
• Notes to Contributors
  
• 'Music & Letters' Awards
  
• Authors of Articles in this Issue
  
• Books Received