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Hugh John Macdonald [1] (born 31 January 1940 in Newbury, Berkshire) is an English musicologist chiefly known for his work within the music of the 19th century, especially in France. He has been general editor of the Hector Berlioz: New Edition of the Complete Works since its inception in 1967 and has been particularly active in the revival of interest in Berlioz's music. He is also the author of several entries within The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians .
Macdonald studied under Raymond Leppard at the University of Cambridge from 1958 to 1966. [1] He went on to pursue doctoral studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1969 from Cambridge, after researching the music of Berlioz for a dissertation consisting of a critical edition of Les Troyens . [1] He served on the faculty of music at Cambridge from 1966 to 1971 and on the music faculty at University of Oxford from 1971 to 1980. [1] He became the Gardiner Professor of Music at Glasgow University in 1980, where he remained until 1987, when he was appointed Avis Blewett Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. [1]
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Antoine-Joseph "Adolphe" Sax was a Belgian inventor and musician who invented the saxophone in the early 1840s, patenting it in 1846. He also invented the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba, and redesigned the bass clarinet in a fashion still used to the present day. He played the flute and clarinet.
Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, "conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone‐picture". "Impressionism" is a philosophical and aesthetic term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting after Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Composers were labeled Impressionists by analogy to the Impressionist painters who use starkly contrasting colors, effect of light on an object, blurry foreground and background, flattening perspective, etc. to make the observer focus their attention on the overall impression.
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts.
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).
Louis-Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer and conductor. His output includes orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy, choral pieces including the Requiem and L'Enfance du Christ, his three operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the most prolific and influential composers of his era, and his piano works continue to be widely performed and recorded.
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term Tondichtung appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term Symphonische Dichtung to his 13 works in this vein, which commenced in 1848.
Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d'un artiste … en cinq parties Op. 14, is a programmatic symphony written by Hector Berlioz in 1830. The first performance was at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830.
Benvenuto Cellini is an opera semiseria in four tableaux by Hector Berlioz, his first full-length work for the stage. Premiered at the Académie Royale de Musique on 10 September 1838, it is a setting of a libretto by Léon de Wailly and Henri Auguste Barbier, who invented most of the plot inspired by the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. The opera is technically challenging and was until the 21st century rarely performed. But its overture sometimes features in orchestral concerts, as does the concert overture Le carnaval romain which Berlioz composed from material in the opera.
Les Troyens is a French grand opera in five acts, running for about five hours, by Hector Berlioz. The libretto was written by Berlioz himself from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid; the score was composed between 1856 and 1858. Les Troyens is Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety. Under the title Les Troyens à Carthage, the last three acts were premièred with many cuts by Léon Carvalho's company, the Théâtre Lyrique, at their theatre on the Place du Châtelet in Paris on 4 November 1863, with 21 repeat performances. The reduced versions run for about three hours. After decades of neglect, today the opera is considered by some music critics as one of the finest ever written.
The voiced bilabial nasal is a type of consonantal sound which has been observed to occur in about 96% of spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨m⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is m. The bilabial nasal occurs in English, and it is the sound represented by "m" in map and rum. Very few languages are known to lack this sound. A small number of languages have been observed to lack independent nasal phonemes altogether, such as Quileute, Makah, and Central Rotokas.
A feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles. The term feuilleton was invented by the editors of the French Journal des débats; Julien Louis Geoffroy and Bertin the Elder, in 1800. The feuilleton has been described as a "talk of the town", and a contemporary English-language example of the form is the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker. In English newspapers, the term instead came to refer to an installment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper.
Thematic transformation is a musical technique in which a leitmotif, or theme, is developed by changing the theme by using permutation, augmentation, diminution, and fragmentation. It was primarily developed by Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz. The technique is essentially one of variation. A basic theme is reprised throughout a musical work, but it undergoes constant transformations and disguises and is made to appear in several contrasting roles. However, the transformations of this theme will always serve the purpose of "unity within variety" that was the architectural role of sonata form in the classical symphony. The difference here is that thematic transformation can accommodate the dramatically charged phrases, highly coloured melodies and atmospheric harmonies favored by the Romantic composers, whereas sonata form was geared more toward the more objective characteristics of absolute music. Also, while thematic transformation is similar to variation, the effect is usually different since the transformed theme has a life of its own and is no longer a sibling to the original theme.
The saxotromba is a valved brass instrument invented by the Belgian instrument-maker Adolphe Sax around 1844. It was designed for the mounted bands of the French military, probably as a substitute for the French horn. The saxotrombas comprised a family of half-tube instruments of different pitches. By about 1867 the saxotromba was no longer being used by the French military, but specimens of various sizes continued to be manufactured until the early decades of the twentieth century, during which time the instrument made sporadic appearances in the opera house, both in the pit and on stage. The instrument is often confused with the closely related saxhorn.
Jan Nepomuk Škroup was a Czech composer, conductor, and choirmaster. His brother František Škroup was also a successful composer, known today as the composer of the Czech national anthem, "Kde domov můj?" . His father, Dominik Škroup, and other brother, Ignác Škroup, were also composers.
Roger David Edward Nichols is an English musicologist, critic, translator and author. After an early career as a university lecturer he became a full-time freelance writer in 1980. He is particularly known for his works on French music, including books about Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc and the Parisian musical scene of the years after the First World War. Among his translations are the English versions of the standard biography of Gabriel Fauré by Jean-Michel Nectoux and of Harry Halbreich's study of Arthur Honegger.
Elizabeth Eva Leach is a British musicologist and music theorist who specializes in medieval music, especially that of the fourteenth century. Much of her scholarship concerns the life and work of Guillaume de Machaut.
Julian Gordon Rushton is an English musicologist, born in Cambridge. He has contributed the entry on Mozart in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera and several other articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and other reference works. He has written a critical study of the style of Hector Berlioz and was involved in critical editions of that composer's works. In 1999, he published an analysis of Elgar's Enigma Variations. His book Coffee with Mozart (2007) has been translated into German. He also wrote Mozart and Mozart: An Extraordinary Life (2006). In addition to his 1983 work The Musical Language of Berlioz, he wrote The Music of Berlioz as well as several articles on Mozart, Berlioz, and Elgar. He was General Editor of Cambridge Music Handbooks, contributing Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette and Elgar, 'Enigma' Variations. He has edited works by Charpentier, Berlioz, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams. He is editor the Cambridge Berlioz Encyclopedia (2018). He was for 25 years chair of the Editorial Committee of Musica Britannica.
The composer Hector Berlioz was a prolific writer who supported himself early in his career by writing musical criticism using a bold, vigorous style, at times imperious and sarcastic. Criticism was an activity "at which he excelled but which he abhorred". Despite his complaints, Berlioz continued writing music criticism for most of his life, long after he had any financial need to do so.
