The presented Master's thesis, titled "Otakar Šourek (1883-1956) - Music critic and writer", deals with Otakar Šourek, the author of the most extensive monograph on Antonín Dvořák to date. Šourek played a significant role in the musical life of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918 - 1938). He worked for numerous music institutions and wrote music reviews, articles and studies for many journals and magazines, as well as books. On the basic of the description of Šourek's public work and his engagement in several music "scandals" in the first Czechoslovak Republic, the thesis strives to evaluate Šourek's position amid the musical life of the time and characterise him as a music critic. The thesis draws upon the study of source materials from Otakar Šourek's personal effects, deposited at the National Museum - Czech Museum of Music, and study of the period press. Key words: music criticism, music, music of the first half of the 20th century, the first Czechoslovak Republic, interwar period, Otakar Šourek

How did music play a consistent role through various memories? In this memoir, I look at the sweet, the traumatic and troubling. I use specific songs as connections to lost loved ones. I pin the power of music to the loss of three important people in my life: my sister, father, and mother. Who were their musical touchstones? Did I share them? Did music run through them as it has always run through me? The memoir is sandwiched by a brief extended metaphor that props up the conceit that we are entering a live concert performance. It is billed as a "letter to a lost loved one" because it is indeed meant to address that lost one, my sister, my guide. In the opening section I've lost my voice. I eventually reclaim it and vow that I will perhaps meet my sister at some point in the future.

La Troisième République a « mystifié » Beethoven. Elle en a fait un personnage de fiction, et l'a intégré au canon républicain français, en le dotant de toutes les valeurs morales et idéologiques qui fondent alors la construction de l'identité nationale. Ce travail vise à mettre en lumière le corpus particulier qui a contribué à la formation de ce mythe, en partie héritier du romantisme, mais aussi éminemment moderne. La critique musicale, la biographie, le roman, le théâtre, l'édition de vulgarisation et l'édition pédagogique sur Beethoven forment un ensemble organique, qui contribue au même but : la glorification du musicien de Bonn. Son image devient alors un matériau littéraire qui va former une véritable littérature beethovénienne, ainsi qu'une poétique, marquées par les emprunts multiples à l'épopée, à l'hagiographie, au roman-feuilleton, au roman picaresque et au drame bourgeois notamment. Cet ensemble composite tend pourtant à la standardisation, dans la mesure où se figent des motifs et des récits-types. Tout ceci contribue à faire de Beethoven le « héros de la conscience moderne ». L'idéologie républicaine l'élève comme figure d'identification et d'édification morale au même titre que les « classiques », de sorte que les intellectuels de l'entre-deux-guerres feront de ce nom un outil de sauvegarde des valeurs humanistes, face à la montée des périls. / The Third Republic « mystified » Beethoven. It turned him into a fictional character, and integrated him into the French republican canon, endowing him with all the moral and ideological values that then were at the root of the construction of national identity. This work aims to highlight a specific corpus, which contributed to the creation of the myth, which partly draws on Romanticism but is also eminently modern. Music criticism, biographies, novels, drama, popularization and educational works about Beethoven constitute an organic group of works, aiming at the glorification of the musician from Bonn. His image thus becomes a literary material, and contributes to building a beethovenian literature, and a beethovenian poetics, which borrows its aesthetics in particular from the epic, hagiography, serialized novels, picaresque novels and bourgeois drama. However this heterogeneous corpus tends towards standardization insofar as the narrative patterns somehow froze as commonplaces. All this leads to Beethoven being turned into the “hero of modern consciousness”. The republican ideology raised him to the rank of an icon both for identification and moral edification, in the same way as the “classics”. To the intellectuals of the interwar period he embodied humanist values and was a symbolic weapon against the rise of totalitarianism.

This thesis investigates early sixteenth-century motet settings of texts taken from the Song of Songs. By way of contextualization, I will explore the Christian history of Song of Songs exegesis from the third century to the twelfth. I will also consider generic properties of the renaissance motet---contemporary definitions of the genre, performance context, types of texts used, and repertory dissemination---and make a case that both the Song of Songs and the motet occupy a sort of "intermediate" position between the secular and the sacred world, participating in both the earthly and the spiritual. / Several motets---Tota pulchra es by Ludwig Senfl, Tota pulchra es by Nicolaus Craen, Nigra sum sed formosa by Johannis Lheritier, and the anonymous Vulnerasti cor meum from Petrucci's Motetti de la Corona I print---will be analyzed through the lens of the historical Christian exegesis and generic considerations of the motet. I interpret diverse musical parameters---among them, texture, quotation of pre-existent material, motivic structuring, cadential manipulation, mode and modal commixture---as some of the ways in which the composers responded to their Song of Songs texts.

Einojuhani Rautavaara's oeuvre is characterised by four distinctive creative periods, each demonstrating a remarkable variety of compositional idioms and styles. His application of multifaceted elements, often within a single work leading to notions of postmodernism, is derived from multifarious sources, such as (Finnish) folklore, Orthodox mysticism and a wide variety of standard twentieth century compositional techniques. Furthermore, Rautavaara regularly quotes from his own material, thus creating elements of auto-allusions within his oeuvre; a predisposition which forms an essential part of his compositional aesthetic. Analyses of eight piano works (1952-2007) provide a cross-section of Rautavaara's output which, together with a consideration of biographical factors and analytical focus on the intertextual elements of his writing, offers a rationale for determining the development of his musical identity. The analyses conclude that intertextual elements, which appear through a diverse array of expressive modes (such as mysticism, nationalism and constructivism) are an essential part of Rautavaara's eclectic compositional style and contribute to an understanding of the on-going development of his musical identity.

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A study of the critical work of Virgil Thomson, critic for the New York Herald Tribune and of Olin Downes, music critic for the New York Times, will perhaps give a better understanding of how different emphasis on purposes may influence critical work. Each man wrote brief, journalistic reviews. They attended many of the same concerts; yet, their critical judgments differed in many respects.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:10:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luiza Spinola Amaral.pdf: 5391999 bytes, checksum: a0305edbd9d9a470ac4abfd8fafaecfb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-05-06 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / The main objective of this research is to rescue the historical memoire of brazilian popular music through the media coverage that jazz festivals get from São Paulo's press. It's also about focusing on the relationship between the cultural industry and the critics, exposing how our musical memory is smothered by a certain sociological view of jazz as just another product of american culture and how this line of opinion, suspicious as it is, counterpoints the semiotic stream of critics that, among other musicologists, belongs Augusto de Campos. It's a documental and bibliographical research. The core of the research is a gathering of journalistic stories exposed here, establishing an analytical overview of São Paulo's press media / O objetivo desta pesquisa é levantar o registro histórico da memória da música popular no Brasil, através de um acompanhamento da cobertura jornalística que os festivais de jazz recebem na mídia impressa paulistana. Trata-se também de enfocar as relações que se estabelecem entre a crítica e a indústria cultural, mostrando como nossa memória musical é inflexionada por certa visão sociológica a partir da qual se enxerga o jazz como mais um produto da indústria cultural norte-americana, e como a esta linha que diríamos marcada pela suspeição contrapõe-se, a partir de determinado momento, à corrente dos semioticistas, a que pertence, enquanto musicólogo, Augusto de Campos. Metodologicamente trata-se de uma pesquisa bibliográfica e documental. O corpus da pesquisa constitui-se no conjunto de matérias críticas jornalísticas aqui em exame, conjunto do qual foi recortada uma parcela de textos a analisar

This thesis examines the life and thought of the influential Melbourne organist, teacher and music critic, Arthur Ernest Howard Nickson (1876-1964). Born in Melbourne, Nickson studied in England on the Clarke Scholarship at the Royal College of Music (1895-1899). During his studies in England, Nickson experienced the Catholic revival in the Church of England at its height. On his return to Australia in 1901 Nickson’s activities as a church musician, and later, as a teacher provided the platform for him to articulate views that were formed as a result of these influences. Beginning in 1904, Nickson’s 56-year career as a lecturer at the University Of Melbourne Conservatorium Of Music is important, as every student had to pass through his lectures at some point in their course. As music critic at the Age from 1927, Nickson played a decisive role in shaping public taste at the time of the establishment of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Bernard Heinze, who was also Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne (1926-57). Nickson’s essays form a distinct group of writings that are probably unique in Australia. The main published essays cover a forty-year period beginning in 1905, and show the development of Nickson’s thinking about the moral basis and spiritual nature of music, his views on the nature of the Church, and his worldview, based on Neoplatonic philosophy, which shaped his thinking about the process of creation. While Nickson’s view of the created order was shaped by Neoplatonic influences, his view of the redemptive function of art was expressed in terms of sacramental theology, and was related very closely to his Anglo-Catholicism. In his essays and lectures Nickson frequently worked with an abstracted concept of ‘Art’, rather than specific art objects. While reference was made to art objects, it is not clear how Nickson defined the term ‘artist’. Nickson’s attention in his discussions of ‘Art’ tended to focus on the artist, rather than the object. This was a result of his world view, which saw art objects as an emanation from the personality of the artist; this necessitated the cultivation of a disposition of mind, which was enabled by the acquisition of mystical intuition. While his description of the fine arts as consisting of architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry and music was in line with older views of art, his views on the artist are difficult to discern, which raises the question of whether Nickson saw himself as an artist. Clearly his vocation was not as a composer, as the discussion of his mass settings in Chapter 3 will demonstrate, while as an organ teacher he was more interested in interpretation than in the mechanics of playing the instrument. This thesis falls into two broad sections. The first three chapters seek to provide an adequate biography of Nickson, which has never previously been done. The fourth chapter examines Nickson’s worldview and the implications this had for his thinking about music, and falls into two parts. The first part follows Nickson’s worldview as it was expressed in his essays, and focuses attention on the concept of art as a process of sign making. The manner in which this sign making is understood is essential to its function, and in Nickson’s writings three understandings emerge: symbol, metaphor and sacrament. The second part of the discussion examines Nickson’s articulation of his worldview in relation to music, which he considered to be the most divine of the arts, drawing on lecture notes, student reminiscences and Nickson’s own. Nickson’s central claim was that art is a sacrament. This can be seen in relation to his faith, where the regular use of the Church’s sacraments was central. This claim is challenged by statements Nickson made about the faith of composers such as Beethoven and Bach. This raises questions about sacramental efficacy when applied to art, and some limitations implicit in viewing art as a sacrament. It will be argued that Nickson conceived of artistic creation as fundamentally a process of sign making. The sign may be regarded as a symbol, metaphor or sacrament, and the process of creating the sign reflects God’s own creative activity in human creative acts. Nickson conceived of human creative action as having a redemptive character, bringing the artist into closer unity with the godhead. This union was the ultimate aim of art, being the act of redemption that paralleled the union brought about by such sacraments as the Eucharist. This term also points to some tensions in Nickson’s worldview, where he expressed a view of the creation of the material world as being both a dynamic, continuing activity of emanation from God, and a single action of the will of God, such as the creation account of Genesis.