While sight-reading remains one of the most fundamental skills for a keyboardist to cultivate, its emergence as a form of musical literacy remains underexplored in musicology. Its outsized coverage in the Parisian press, particularly around the annual concours publics du Conservatoire, reveals a critical discourse of sight-reading as a metric for award-worthy pianism. This article recounts the pedagogical and critical history of sight-reading at the Paris Conservatoire, bringing together curricular records, pedagogical texts, press reviews, and morceaux de déchiffrage composed by Luigi Cherubini, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, and Jeanne Leleu. Sight-reading’s critical press reception, while gendered, also created avenues for female Conservatoire graduates—such as Boulanger, Leleu, Eugénie Carjat, Hortense Parent, and many others—to build careers out of the ability to decipher music at first sight. While the sight-reading portion of the concours publics remained controversial through the end of the nineteenth century, the unique imbrication of spontaneous and premeditated modes of performance provided a platform on which women could recast fluent reading as a marketable facet of a modernizing pianistic economy.
Praise for Arthur Sullivan's operetta music often singles out his varied rhythmic treatment of Gilbert's highly regular verse. Prior studies tend to examine Sullivan's text-setting in a vacuum, without a framework for comparing his approach to that of nineteenth-century composers more generally. Such a framework has emerged in recent scholarship on German art song. This article thus attempts both to use current theory (particularly Yonatan Malin's theory of "declamatory schemas") to pinpoint the distinctive aspects of Sullivan's approach and also to use Sullivan's music to expand our conception of the possible relationships between poetic and musical meters. The article particularly focuses on cases when Sullivan shifts from one schema to another. Rather than describe these moments as successions (in which one schema follows another), the article instead treats them as transformations (in which one schema is converted into another), with focus on four schema transformation techniques: selective compression/expansion and stress promotion/demotion. It shows how Sullivan's deployment of these transformations is motivated by characterization and the inflection of particular words and concludes by affirming the value of applying declamatory schema theory to music that is neither German nor "serious" and the necessity of performing style analysis within a framework that discloses an individual composer's dialogue with common musical practices, shedding light on composer and practice alike.
While sight-reading remains one of the most fundamental skills for a keyboardist to cultivate, its emergence as a form of musical literacy remains underexplored in musicology. Its outsized coverage in the Parisian press, particularly around the annual concours publics du Conservatoire, reveals a critical discourse of sight-reading as a metric for award-worthy pianism. This article recounts the pedagogical and critical history of sight-reading at the Paris Conservatoire, bringing together curricular records, pedagogical texts, press reviews, and morceaux de d & eacute;chiffrage composed by Luigi Cherubini, Gabriel Faur & eacute;, Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, and Jeanne Leleu. Sight-reading's critical press reception, while gendered, also created avenues for female Conservatoire graduates-such as Boulanger, Leleu, Eug & eacute;nie Carjat, Hortense Parent, and many others-to build careers out of the ability to decipher music at first sight. While the sight-reading portion of the concours publics remained controversial through the end of the nineteenth century, the unique imbrication of spontaneous and premeditated modes of performance provided a platform on which women could recast fluent reading as a market-able facet of a modernizing pianistic economy
This article examines the transformation of Jewish musical identity through the lens of Friedrich Gernsheim's Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, op. 54, highlighting its unique position at the intersection of absolute and program music. Initially presented as an absolute symphony at its 1888 premiere, the work was only later recontextualized through a Jewish programmatic lens, with its title Mirjam-Sinfonie appearing in 1903 and a full program first published in Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1909. This delayed revelation underscores the complex interplay of Jewish particularity within nineteenth-century German universalist ideals of art music. This article situates the work in histories of Jewishness in music and interrogates how aesthetic interpretations shifted with the later programmatic integration of Biblical association. Through careful analysis of early performance history, I uncover the sociocultural pressures that necessitated a gradual revelation of the Symphony's programmatic content, which stands in contrast to the lack of overt sonic markers of Jewishness. This article argues that understanding the Mirjam-Sinfonie as both an absolute and programmatic work provides deeper insights into the professional and societal challenges faced by German-speaking Jewish musicians in the long nineteenth century. Keywords: Gernsheim, programmatic music, absolute music, Jews, Bible
"Object Lesson: Mel Bonis's Hand" explores the legacy of French composer M & eacute;lanie H & eacute;l & egrave;ne Bonis through four specific artifacts: her autograph score of the piano piece M & eacute;lisande, the 1887 cast of her hand, a pincushion, and a folding fan. Proposing a "hermeneutics of the hand," the article treats the hand as an organ of embodied knowledge bridging historical subjects and modern performers. The analysis of the hand cast alongside the score reveals a somatic bond created through the proprioceptive acuity of Bonis's pianism. Domestic objects like the pincushion and fan further serve as traces of the gendered social constraints Bonis navigated in the Third Republic. Ultimately, these haptic artifacts illuminate a shared physical and musical connection between the composer and her illegitimate daughter, Madeleine.
