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"Gelbart, Matthew"
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Once More to Mendelssohn's Scotland
Many of Mendelssohn's letters and statements demonstrate his aversion to any music, including the traditions he encountered on his travels in Scotland and other destinations, when it stood outside certain aesthetic and technical teachings that in his student years he took to heart as universal axioms. Friction becomes evident between this rejection of rule-breaking styles and his Romantic desire to be connected to folk music, furthered by his visual and literary attraction to Scotland particularly. I argue that this cognitive dissonance spurred Mendelssohn to transform folk modality—real and imagined—into a personalized form in his work. A striking example is the “double tonic” effect associated with many Scottish modal melodies: the rapid alternation between outlined triads a whole step apart. Though this tool could potentially create the type of exoticism the composer tried to avoid in his mature work, he nevertheless later adapted the feature to articulate all the main cadential passages of his “Scottish” Symphony's first movement; but he found a way to rework the double tonic's inherent melodic dynamism into harmonic stasis, thus preserving the artistic laws he valued while creating a special sound at the same time. Inflecting some theories by other scholars on Mendelssohn's “Scottish” style(s), I examine how this and his other altered evocations of modality temper or even displace functional harmonic tension, and elements of this style permeate some of the composer's other works to become a topos. Nevertheless, the “Scottish” music, especially the Symphony, is more deeply affected than the other works—reflecting a unique set of circumstances.
Journal Article
ALTERITY AND UNIVERSALISM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MUSICAL THOUGHT UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 30 MAY–1 JUNE 2014
In every aspect of cultural theory, considering both the apparently universal aspects of our common humanity and the manifold differences between cultures and individuals is such a huge and fraught undertaking that no one conference can hope to do more than chip away at the edges of the questions raised. This is true even if the purview is limited to the historical study of eighteenth-century musical approaches to these questions. Nevertheless, chipping away at those edges is productive and stimulating, and in this spirit we converged at Oxford – part of the time at the music faculty at St Aldate’s, and part of the time at Wadham College – to discuss ‘Alterity and Universalism in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’. The conference was organized by David R. M. Irving (Australian National University) and Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) under the auspices of Reinhard Strohm's Balzan prize. Strohm is only the second musicologist (the other was Ludwig Finscher) to have received the Balzan award. He will pursue his ambitious project called ‘Towards a Global History of Music’ over the coming three years.
Journal Article
ALLAN RAMSAY, THE IDEA OF ‘SCOTTISH MUSIC’ AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ‘NATIONAL MUSIC’ IN EUROPE
This article examines the process of fashioning an idea of ‘national’ music, by considering the social and political conditions that made such an idea possible at a particular historical moment. An early example, Scotland, is the focus here, and helps to show the type of discursive and active work involved in giving meaning to the idea of ‘Scottish music’ in a cultural sense. I argue that the poet and song collector Allan Ramsay played a central role in the years beginning around 1720. Before Ramsay's generation, there was only a limited sense of ethnic identity translating into poetic or musical style. Furthermore, Ramsay himself, in attempting to harness song and music as national cultural capital, also had to contend with the fact that Scotland was ethnically, culturally and linguistically split along the Highland–Lowland divide, and in other ways as well. Through his song collection A Tea-Table Miscellany and his follow-up publication of tunes for that collection, as well as through his involvement with Edinburgh's elite musical community, Ramsay helped transform Scotland's musical culture from a manuscript-based milieu organized around specific musical functions and occasions to one in which national origins helped validate music, and printed collections enshrined such groupings. Lastly, in addition to its direct influence, Ramsay's work helped shape the emergent discourse about national song indirectly: an extensive outgrowth of thought rooted partly in Ramsay's own ideas led to his being used as a negative example among collectors of ‘folk’ music from the later eighteenth century onward.
Journal Article
A COHESIVE SHAMBLES: THE CLASH'S `LONDON CALLING' AND THE NORMALIZATION OF PUNK
The Clash's London Calling was released just at the moment when the British punk movement seemed to be imploding. From the earliest reviews, it was received as a musical masterpiece that drew on many styles while still managing to be `punk' in some sense. This article argues that London Calling normalized punk, allowing it to be more than an event: punk could henceforth be assimilated into traditional musical discourse and aesthetics. As a careful balancing act between punk street-cred and mainstream musical values, London Calling allowed a double reading. Punk fans could find in it what they sought: anti-establishment anger and at times a messy, disdainful approach to conventional musicianship. At the same time critics and listeners who had come since the late sixties to assimilate rock into a Romantic (or post-Romantic) system of `art' values could find in it what they sought: stylistic growth, organic coherence, originality, and even a `universal' narrative of struggle, triumph, and redemption played out across the album. It is possible to isolate not only a story, but musical connections between the songs (keys, recurrent motifs, and topoi) all laid out in a logical manner. However, unlike concept albums in the seventies' progressive rock style against which punk reacted, London Calling often calls attention away from its musical coherence, and even its textual coherence, rather than towards it—such as by the last-minute addition of a bonus track that disrupts the narrative and key schemes established earlier. The ease with which the album can be praised in established musical language should not completely obscure its potential (and the general potential of punk) to undercut and confront conventional musical discourse.
Journal Article
\The Language of Nature\: Music as Historical Crucible for the Methodology of Folkloristics
Gelbart features an annotation by Scotland's national poet Robert Burns on music as a language of nature and poetry, which seems at first sight like an expansion of a bland cliche. But, according to Gelbart, it explains a situation that has not been sufficiently documented in the literature: for about a century and a half, musical folklorists operated differently from those studying other genres of folklore. Here, he charts the background of these assumptions and compare some methodologies.
Journal Article
Speaking of Music in the Romantic Era
I start from the position that it is impossible to “speak of music” in more than the most vague and abstract terms without broaching the issue of genre. I mean genre broadly conceived as the place where music as text meets music as social act or communication: the place where expectations are met or defied, where individual performative utterances fit into cultural contexts and habitus—in short, the place where music makes its meaning.² Of course, genre in this broad sense is a huge and messy conglomeration of ideas and rules of engagement. It operates not only on several levels
Book Chapter
SCOTTISH AND WELSH SONGS
Because Thomson was terrified of print piracy, however - and because he sometimes had not decided which words to use for a song, or had not even commissioned the words - he did not share the texts or even the titles of the melodies when he sent them abroad to be harmonized. [...]of their history, the settings present an interesting hybrid of styles, and the quality of the music and the poems (some being Burns at his best, others fashionable doggerel of the time) varies as well. Yet the world of classical music does not like group projects. Since the age of Beethoven, professional art musicians have promoted the idea of the single inspired genius, alone in a garret, at whose feet we can lay the laurels for the effects of a piece of music. [...]the engineers at Brilliant have once again released a huge set of CDs with top-notch production values for an extremely low price.
Journal Article