Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

musical
history
as seen
through
contemporary
eyes
Essays in Honor of
H. Robert Cohen
Benjamin Knysak and
Zdravko Blažeković, editors

Musical History
As Seen Through
Contemporary Eyes

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
MUSICAL HISTORY
AS SEEN THROUGH
CONTEMPORARY EYES
Essays in Honor of
H. Robert Cohen
edited by
Benjamin Knysak and Zdravko Blažeković
3

4
Introduction

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
H. Robert Cohen at the International Musicological Society congress in Rome, 2012.
5

Introduction
Support for this volume was provided by the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and
Documentation of the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Benjamin Knysak and Zdravko Blažeković (eds.)
Musical History as Seen through Contemporary Eyes. Essays in Honor of H. Robert Cohen
Hollitzer Verlag, Vienna 2021
Cover design: Fred Gates Design, New York.
Image of Ornette Coleman interpreted from Jazz Magazine 1, no. 3 (Spring 1977). Used with permission.
© Hollitzer Verlag, Vienna 2021
www.hollitzer.at
Layout: Nikola Stevanović
Printed and bound in the EU
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means,
digital, electronic or mechanical, or by photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the
Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher.
Responsibility for the content and for questions of copyright lies with the author.
ISBN 978-3-99012-973-9 (hbk)
ISBN 978-3-99012-974-6 (pdf)
6

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond 13
THE MUSICAL PRESS
Malena Kuss
A Ditty for a Friend: Honoring H. Robert Cohen through the Work of
Zoila Lapique Becali (b. 1930), Doyenne of Cuba’s Musical Press 25
Zoila Lapique Becali
Nineteenth-Century Music in Cuban Periodicals (1822–1868) 29
Marten Noorduin
The International Tours of Charles Hallé
as Viewed in the Contemporary Press 45
Elvidio Surian
Appunti sulla musica sacra in Italia nel Novecento 57
Benjamin Knysak
“That Derty Review”: John C. Freund from Oxford to New York 61
Ruth Henderson
Max Strakosch’s Rediscovered Memoir 83
Max Strakosch
Notes of Max Strakosch 85
Richard Kitson
Ursula Greville, Philip Heseltine and The Sackbut (London, 1920–1934) 109
Antonio Baldassarre
Serving “German music” and “the Great Empire of the Germans”:
The German Periodical Musik im Kriege 125
7

Introduction
BERLIOZ, FRANCE AND VERDI
Peter Bloom
Berlioz and the Panthéon—Then and Now 183
Catherine Massip
Hector Berlioz (… et les autres) dans
l’Illustration de Bade et d’Alsace (1858–1867) 201
Joost van Gemert
A Multifaceted Debate: French, German and Dutch Views
on Gregorian Chant in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals 217
Allan W. Atlas
The Binfields and the Dulckens:
The English Concertina in mid-Nineteenth-Century Paris (and Brussels) 237
Ralph P. Locke
André Messager’s Les p’tites Michu and the Marvels of French Light Opera:
A Review and Appreciation 259
John H. Roberts
Recalled to Life: The Grands Opėras of Charles Gounod 281
Jennifer A. Ward
“Oui, j’existe”: Marie Bobillier and the French
Musical Sources in Robert Eitner’s Quellen-Lexikon 301
Peter Sühring
Der Scherz des Falstaff war nicht sein letztes Wort. Verdis Sakralmusik 321
MUSIC ICONOGRAPHY
Zdravko Blažeković
The Early Years of the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale 345
Florence Gétreau
Three Founders of Music Iconography in France:
Geneviève Thibault de Chambure, Albert Pomme de Mirimonde,
and François Lesure 381
8

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
Luísa Cymbron
Bringing the S. Carlos Theater into the Home: Opera, Illustrated Journalism
and Sound Transmission Technologies in Late Nineteenth-Century Lisbon 413
Frits Zwart
To the Cinema with Willem Mengelberg:
A Meeting with Stokowski and Tchaikovsky 433
Tatjana Marković
“Oriental” memories: Stevan Stojanović Mokranjac’s ballad Lem Edim 445
POPULAR MUSICS AND R-PROJECTS
John M. Ehrenburg
If You Want to Learn to Play Jazz, Pick Up That Magazine
or
A Critical (Re)Introduction to Pedagogical Content Published
in the Jazz Press, 1914–1947 469
Emile Wennekes
Bob, Boris, and Boudewijn: H. Robert Cohen’s international
footsteps elucidated through three singer-songwriters 487
Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie
A Tale of Two R-Project Directors 501
Jean-Michel Nectoux, Don Roberts
Words of Thanks 513
TABULA GRATULATORIA 517
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF H. ROBERT COHEN 521
9

10
Introduction

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
INTRODUCTION
11

12
Introduction

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
INTRODUCTION
MUSICAL DOCUMENTATION OF A
“FORGOTTEN CENTURY” AND BEYOND
In 1968, to inaugurate the establishment of a new Ph.D. program at the City
University of New York (CUNY), the chair of this foundling department,
Barry S. Brook (1918–1997), invited fifteen distinguished scholars to give lectures
on different aspects of the growing discipline of musicology. 1 Providing
the first lecture in this series was none other than Gustave Reese (1899–1977),
Professor of Music at nearby New York University, founding member of the
American Musicological Society, and a distinguished figure in the field. In
the course of his lecture, Reese provides an overview of musicology in the
late 1960s: its foundations, status and growth in American academia; divisions
of the discipline; prominent specializations; and lacunae. 2 Reflecting
the postwar musicological focus on music of earlier eras, Reese describes the
nineteenth century as a period requiring “an immense amount of work,” summarizing
it as a musicologically–“forgotten century.” 3
One of Reese’s students, H. Robert Cohen, took up this charge over the
following five decades. Cohen’s efforts brought to scholarly attention a trove
of nineteenth-century musical iconography, staging manuals, Italian figurini,
and above all, the vast musical press from the eighteenth through the twentieth
centuries. In total, his contributions to the discipline as author, editor, and
director comprises some 327 printed volumes, one journal, numerous articles,
and four databases which contain nearly two million full text pages, more
than a million annotated citations, and treat some six hundred music journals.
Howard Robert Cohen was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied music
in his youth, performing on clarinet and saxophone, absorbing music ranging
from orchestral works to performances at local jazz clubs. Cohen attended New
York University, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts (1963), Master of Arts (1967),
and Ph.D. (1973). Interested in music in nineteenth-century France, specifically
the writings and criticism of Hector Berlioz, he traveled to Paris on a Fulbright
grant where he pursued much of the research for his Ph.D. dissertation,
1 These essays were collected and published in 1972 by W.W. Norton and republished in 1975
in a paperback edition. Perspectives in Musicology, ed. Barry S. Brook, Edward O.D. Downes,
and Sherman Van Solkema (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972).
2 Gustave Reese, “Perspectives and Lacunae in Musicological Research. Inaugural Lecture.”
Ibid, 1–14.
3 Ibid., 10.
13

Introduction
“Berlioz at the Opéra (1829–1849): A Study in Music Criticism.” 4 Concurrently,
he served as a Maître-Assistant professor at the Université de Paris VIII from
1968 to 1972. Owing to the French difficulty in pronouncing Howard (phonetically
in French, awaʁ) he began using H. Robert Cohen professionally, to
which we now know him.
During this period in Paris, Cohen observed les évènements de 1968 firsthand,
from both the street level and in the university, where he became perhaps
the first person to teach the history of jazz at the Université de Paris and
published his first article, on the music of Bob Dylan, who Cohen heard in
New York’s Greenwich Village while he was a student. 5 In 1972, Cohen returned
to North America when he was appointed to the faculty of Université
Laval in Québec where he directed graduate studies and served as Director of
the European Studies Program. It is from here that his next foray into archival
sources occurred when he happened upon the music iconography published
in the French journal L’Illustration. A weekly beginning in 1843, the journal
lavishly depicted musical life in Paris and published more than three thousand
images depicting musical life in the nineteenth century alone. Cohen’s resulting
three-volume catalog and study of the musical iconography in L’Illustration
was published under the auspices of the recently-established Répertoire International
d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) in 1982 and 1983, a project which
received significant critical praise. 6
In subsequent years, Cohen continued to uncover and compile documentary
resources. Growing from his Berlioz research, he was instrumental in the
foundation and initial publication of the complete musical criticism of Berlioz,
published as La critique musicale in ten volumes between 1996 and 2020
(Paris: Buchet-Chastel). Cohen served as co-editor of the first volume and
directed the assembly of Berlioz’s original texts. He published volumes studying
and cataloging mise-en-scène in France in the 1980s and the 1990s. 7 At the
4 Howard Robert Cohen, “Berlioz at the Opéra (1829–1849): A Study in Music Criticism.”
Ph.D. dissertation, New York Univeristy (1973).
5 H. Robert Cohen, “Bob Dylan: His Generation and his Protest.” Les langues modernes 66, 1
(1972): 73–78.
6 H. Robert Cohen, Les Gravures musicales dans L’Illustration de 1843 à 1899. 3 vols. (New York:
Pendragon Press, 1982–83).
7 H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou. Cent ans de mise en scène lyrique en France (env.
1830–1930) = One Hundred Years of Operatic Staging in France: Catalogue descriptif des livrets de
mise en scène, des libretti annotés et des partitions annotées dans la Bibliothèque de l’Association de la
régie théâtrale (Paris). La vie musicale en France au XIXe siècle 2 (New York: Pendragon Press,
1986). H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou. The original staging manuscripts for twelve
Parisian operatic premieres = Douze livrets de mise en scène lyrique datant des créations parisiennes.
La vie musicale en France au XIXe siècle 3 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991).
14

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
1982 International Musicological Society conference, a panel was convened
on French archives and archival sources for the music historian; this collection
of essays, compiled and introduced by Cohen, was published in 19th Century
Music. 8 Following his appointment to the faculty of the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, he founded the Center for Nineteenth Century
Music Studies to facilitate research in this growing domain.
* * *
Cohen’s magnum opus is RIPM, Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale.
Established in 1980, RIPM’s genesis can be found in his experiences as
a graduate student. As a member of a generation of scholars who sought to reimagine
nineteenth-century musical studies through a richer, contextualized,
granular, and international perspective—contra that which was handed down
by the largely-German founding fathers of the discipline—a great amount
of foundational work was required: to develop bibliographies, establish basic
historical facts, gauge critical reception, record repertory, identify performers
and performances, locate biographical information … in short, to document
and understand the vast milieu of nineteenth-century musical life. For this,
the musical press was vital—where else could one so completely immerse oneself
in contemporary musical life, to view musical history through the eyes
of those who lived it? Yet, here he sat in the reading room of the Bibliothèque
National in Paris, taking a volume off the shelf, turning hundreds of pages,
making notes, and returning it back to the shelf for the next researcher to
come along, take the same volume off the shelf and turn the same hundreds of
pages. He has often remarked about the seeming absurdity of this: In an era
of networked computers and space travel, how could one still rely upon such
ancient and inefficient methods?
The foundation of RIPM came at a fortuitous time. A burgeoning scholarly
interest in the nineteenth-century press, demonstrated through such projects
as the Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, the Wellesley Index to Victorian
Periodicals, and the Bibliographie des revues et journaux littéraires des XIX e et XX e
siècles provided points-of-departure. At the same time, the value of computer
technology and its application in the humanities had been validated through
an increasing number of projects, most relatedly in Barry S. Brook’s Réper-
H. Robert Cohen, Dix livrets de mise en scène lyrique datant des créations parisiennes, 1824–1843 =
The Original Staging Manuals for Ten Parisian Operatic Premières, 1824–1843. La vie musicale en
France au XIXe siècle 6 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1998).
8 19th-Century Music 7, no. 2 (1983).
15

Introduction
toire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM) which began producing
indexes to current music literature via a IBM S360 mainframe computer
in 1967. Although calls for retrospective indexing of music periodicals had
existed since the 1930s, the scope of the challenge—thousands of journals,
published in dozens of languages, totaling millions of pages—made such a
project nearly impossible before the computer age.
After a proposal to the board of the International Association of Music
Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML) in 1980, RIPM was
officially approved one year later; approval by the IMS followed in 1983. The
foundational years of RIPM—ca. 1981 to 1987—were consumed by the innumerable
tasks required to begin such a large-scale project: Indexing norms
were debated and formalized through a Commission Mixte; selection of the
journals for priority indexing was made; networks of collaborators and supporters
were established; staff at the Center for Nineteenth Century Music
Studies were hired and managed; a parallel center, the Centro internazionale
di ricerca sui periodici musicali (CIRPM) in Parma and directed by Marcello
Conati, was created; computer applications for data input and indexing were
written; arrangements with a publisher, UMI of Ann Arbor, Michigan, were
made; publisher’s advertising materials were created; initial data samples were
input, edited, and revised; methods for printing and generating camera-ready
copy were devised; publication of an annual journal, Periodica musica, on bibliographic
and research problems concerning the musical press, was initiated;
and perhaps most importantly, the funding for all of these initiatives was
secured. After all, even with the best of intentions, hard-working colleagues,
and expectant scholars, a project cannot be successful without funds to pay for
everything from salaries to equipment to trash collection. In this, Cohen was
incredibly successful: RIPM’s twenty-four consecutive years of funding from
the National Endowment for the Humanities, five grants from the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, many years of support from UNESCO’s International
Council on Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, and numerous grants and
subventions from European universities and musical societies demonstrated
the scholarly importance of RIPM, yes, but also proved Cohen’s dogged determination
that RIPM should succeed.
Finally, in 1988—after moving the Center for Nineteenth Century Music
Studies to the University of Maryland—the first RIPM publications appeared.
Naturally, these treated two French journals: La Chronique musicale
(Paris, 1873–1876) and L’Art musical (Paris, 1860–1894). Titles in German,
English, and Italian followed quickly with a promised publication plan of
ten volumes per year. In the subsequent reviews, scholars widely praised the
16

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
project: “an essential stepping-stone into the riches of nineteenth-century
periodical literature” (Music & Letters), “should be on the reference shelves of
every major library” ( Journal of the American Musicological Society), “The excellence
of this worthwhile project is beyond doubt” (Times Literary Supplement). 9
Regarding the promised publication schedule and scope, Robert frequently
recounts—with pride—that at the 1987 IMS meeting in Bologna and Parma,
one distinguished scholar pronounced that Robert “was nuts” to attempt
something so ambitious.
In the 1990s, with the addition of Christoph-Helmut Mahling’s research
center at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz, these production goals
were continually met. This decade saw the creation of new RIPM groups in
Scandinavia, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, and Portugal, with
additional indexing carried out at the International Center in Maryland. By
1998, RIPM had achieved its initial goal, namely, one hundred volumes in ten
years, a rate of production noted by multiple NEH reviewers, one of whom
described it as “a dream of productivity that is virtually unprecedented in the
field of musical scholarship.” 10
With the dawn of the new millennium, Robert laid the groundwork for a
wholesale transformation of RIPM in the coming two decades. First, RIPM
became incorporated as a federally-approved not-for-profit organization and
RIPM’s offices were relocated to Baltimore, achieving financial and administrative
independence. Concurrently, after one decade with the publisher
UMI, Robert negotiated a new contract with the Baltimore-based publisher
NISC, thereby beginning RIPM’s entry into online distribution. In 2000, the
RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals Online first appeared on NISC’s
Biblioline service. Additional online distributors would be added in the next
decade, including OCLC’s FirstSearch, EBSCO’s EBSCOHost, and Ovid’s
SilverPlatter. 11
However, the usefulness of an index to source material is certainly dependent
upon one’s access to the sources cited. Since scholars “rediscovered”
the wealth of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical press, three issues
prevented its wider study and application in scholarship, namely (i) which
journals were important, both for general musical information and specialized
studies; (ii) how and where can one quickly access a copy of the journals
sought; and (iii) how does one locate content within thousands of pages, if no
9 Music & Letters 71, no. 1 (February 1990). Journal of the American Musicological Society 43, no. 3
(Fall 1990). Times Literary Supplement (31 March – 6 April 1989).
10 “Reviews.” https://ripm.org/?page=Reviews (accessed 24 February 2021).
11 For more on the challenges and complexities of the world of scholarly databases, see Barbara
Dobbs Mackenzie’s essay herein, “A Tale of Two R-Project Directors”: 501-11..
17

Introduction
index is available. By the early 2000s, RIPM had done much to solve the first
problem, through publication of Periodica musica and the increased scholarly
attention given to the musical press, and the last problem, through its continual
indexing efforts which by circa 2005 had resulted in some one hundred
fifty volumes published and 450,000 annotated citations online. The second
problem remained largely unresolved. Although RIPM had jointly sponsored
a preservation microfilming project with UMI in the 1990s, which made available
a number of rare journals, the increasingly-widespread availability of the
World Wide Web meant that one could search and read historic texts from
one’s home or office at the speed of a click. 12 With an initial foundation laid by
the efforts of JSTOR in the late 1990s, Robert began a study of best practices
for digitization. With the support of two grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals debuted in
2009. In order to meet the project’s need for original source copies, RIPM created
a Partner and Participating Libraries program which has allowed RIPM to
scan millions of pages from dozens of major libraries ranging from the Library
of Congress to the Moscow Conservatory, and the Cenidim in Mexico City to
the Eastman School of Music’s Sibley Music Library. 13 RIPM created an onsite
scanning laboratory, scanning equipment for use offsite in libraries, developed
a robust IT infrastructure, established hosting servers and all of the associated
technological requirements, too numerous to list.
Development of RIPM’s digitization efforts coincided with a consolidation
amongst RIPM’s online distributors following the financial crisis of
2008. As such, Robert advocated for the creation of RIPM’s own online
delivery platform which came to be known as RIPMPlus. The creation of
this platform—and the flexibility and control it offered to RIPM—laid the
groundwork for RIPM’s future digital initiatives. First, through its scanning
operations, massive collections were made available to RIPM including many
journals which ran for tens to hundreds of thousands of pages. The necessity
of a project which could provide access to large quantities of journals,
in complete runs, scanned and full-text searchable, without having to wait
for indexing, became clear. Thus the RIPM Preservation Series was born—
initially titled the RIPM Full Text Supplement, later the eLibrary of Music
Periodicals—a project which continues to grow, approaching one million
pages and billions of searchable terms.
12 Certainly this is a fulfillment of Barry S. Brook’s “Gin and Tonic Phantasy,” as illuminated
by Zdravko Blažeković’s essay herein. See “The Early Years of the Répertoire International
d’Iconographie Musicale,” 353.
13 A complete, up-to-date list of Parter and Participating Libraries is available on RIPM’s website,
ripm.org.
18

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
Since his youth in Baltimore where his uncle took Robert to jazz clubs,
in his adolescence when he played saxophone in a band, and through his university
years in 1960s New York, Robert has always been a jazz aficionado.
Almost since RIPM’s inception, the large and vital jazz press had remained on
RIPM’s desiderata list. Finally, in 2016 RIPM signed an agreement with the
Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, the
famed jazz archive. Jazz periodicals represented a departure for RIPM: Not
only was the musical genre entirely different from RIPM’s other journals, but
these journals also presented new challenges related to copyright and rights
holders. Nevertheless, in 2019 RIPM Jazz Periodicals debuted, allowing full
text access for the first time to 105 journals which documented and discussed
jazz’s development from 1914 to 2000. To say the project has drawn great
interest and enthusiasm would be an understatement; as one reviewer noted,
RIPM Jazz Periodicals stands to “revolutionize this field by giving jazz researchers
a huge vocabulary of common source material.” 14
* * *
This narrative is necessarily reductive, compressing some forty years of labor
into a few mere paragraphs. It lends the impression that success was inevitable.
However, the labor required to establish scholarly networks, apply for and
preserve funding, maintain production quality and quantity, obtain projectsustaining
grants and subscriptions, hire capable staff … such are the pitfalls
which bedevil many a well-intentioned academic project. Yet, thanks to Robert,
RIPM succeeded.
H. Robert Cohen is the last of the founding directors of the R-projects.
As he often recalls, he came of scholarly age during the postwar generation of
musicology, studying with Gustave Reese and taking the A train in New York
with Barry S. Brook, founder of two R-projects himself. 15 This was an age
where source studies were vital and central to musicology. Afterall, how can
we say anything definitively as historians if we do not have control over the
sources? But with new technologies, and with determination, we could gain
control and thereby deepen our knowledge of musical history and to correct
the received historical record. A “forgotten century” could be rediscovered.
14 Carlos Peña, “RIPM Jazz Periodicals.” Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association
(March 2020): 486–90.
15 Cohen recalled this during a memorial session to Brook at the 2015 IAML-IMS Congress
in New York. As Robert has noted, he only barely missed Curt Sachs, a great figure of
prewar musicology in Germany, who began teaching at NYU in 1937 after emigrating from
Germany.
19

Introduction
Robert proudly states that he chose his own path in musicology. When advised
to pursue a traditional career path, which would have involved a faculty
appointment at a large, likely American university, he chose to teach in Paris,
Universitè Laval in Quebec City, and the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver. When advised to pursue topics en vogue in 1960s musicology, he
chose to work on Berlioz, the French nineteenth century, iconography and
unexplored documentation sources. When advised to not involve himself in a
career-consuming project, he chose to develop RIPM, a project on the musical
press, at that time a wild and uncontrolled realm. While all of this demonstrates
a certain iconoclastic streak, the importance of primary sources for
our understanding of musical history remained his central focus: the musical
press, iconography, staging manuals, statuettes. Naturally, this is the focus of
this volume: Musical History as Seen through Contemporary Eyes.
* * *
Reflective of Robert’s diverse interests, the contributions to this volume contain
a number of themes, many of which overlap, and draw upon a range of
source material.
Naturally, the musical press plays a large role in this volume. Malena Kuss
translates the distinguished Cuban musicologist and librarian Zoila Lapique
Becali’s delightful and insightful study of nineteenth-century music in Cuban
periodicals. Marten Nooduin offers an exploration of the reception history
of the pianist cum conductor Charles Hallé via the mid-nineteenth century
European press. Elvidio Surian identifies a lacuna in the study of Italian musical
history in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, namely, sacred music
journals. I uncover the unscrupulous and aggrandizing activities of the young
editor and critic, John C. Freund, in the 1870s. Reflecting her copious work
for RIPM on the nineteenth-century American musical press, Ruth Henderson
transcribes and annotates the long-lost memoir of Max Strakosch, an important
figure in nineteenth-century American musical life. Richard Kitson
calls attention to a little-known figure in British music journalism, Ursula
Greville, her merits as a writer and editor, and her struggles as a female in the
male-dominated world of early twentieth century British music journalism.
Antonio Baldassarre offers a significant study of the Nazi wartime journal
Musik im Kriege and the German press culture from which it appeared, probing
the relationship between music writing and the rise of repugnant politics.
Berlioziana is naturally found here. Peter Bloom’s insightful and politically-probing
essay on the historiography of Berlioz, drawn from two centenary
20

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
celebrations of Berlioz’s birth, explores French attitudes toward the composer
across more than a century. Catherine Massip explores Berlioz’s relationship
to the town of Baden-Baden at the intersection of iconography and the
nineteenth-century press. More broadly, music in France is explored in four
papers: Joost van Gemert explores the transnational reaction to nineteenthcentury
debates concerning the use of Gregorian chant in the French church.
Allan Atlas uncovers two families in Paris and Brussels who performed upon,
and promoted, the English concertina. Ralph Locke writes an appreciation of
opérette via a recent recording of Andre Messager’s delightful Les p’tites Michu.
John Roberts explores the compositional history of, and critical reaction to,
the lesser-known Grands Opéras of Charles Gounod. Relating to both French
musical bibliography and the R-projects, Jennifer Ward explores Marie Bobillier’s
central importance to Robert Eitner in his Quellen-Lexikon catalog,
the forerunner to the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM).
Bobillier, who wrote under the nom-de-plume Michel Brenet, demonstrated
the problems faced by female music historians and bibliographers in the early
twentieth century. Finally, reflecting Robert’s work on Giuseppe Verdi, Peter
Sühring analyses Verdi’s sacred compositions, a lesser-explored area of Verdi’s
oeuvre.
Music iconography is explored in five papers, beginning with two on the
scholarly history of the discipline. Zdravko Blažeković provides a history of the
foundation and early years of the fellow R-project, the Répertoire International
d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM). Florence Gétreau assesses the work of three
founders of music iconography as a scholarly discipline in France. Luísa Cymbron
provides us with a delightful exploration of visual depictions of sound
transmission technologies in late-nineteenth century Lisbon. Frits Zwart explores
the relationship between the conductors Willem Mengelberg and Leopold
Stokowski via a photograph of Mengelberg leaving the cinema. Finally, Tatjana
Marković analyses how sources—iconographical, textual, musical—define cultural
memory through the publication of a single ballad.
Jazz and popular music also make appearances. Reflecting Robert’s longstanding
love of jazz, John Ehrenburg provides a reappraisal of pedagogical
studies published in jazz periodicals, exploring the long-asked question of “how
do you learn jazz?” Harkening back to Robert’s first published article, on Bob
Dylan, Emile Wennekes muses on three cultural environments in which Robert
is professionally and privately active: the United States, France, and the Netherlands,
through three singer-songwriters within each national context.
Finally, Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie offers us a glimpse into the “nanoniche”
world of the R-project directors. As she astutely notes, directing an
21

Introduction
R-project requires one to draw upon a vast toolbox of skills, experience, and
motivation; moreover it requires the ability to commit oneself to a project
much bigger than an individual, traits demonstrated by Robert over the fortyyear
span of RIPM.
†
We remember Katy Romanou (1939–2020), of the European University of
Cyprus, who planned to contribute a paper on the vogue for philhellenic music
in Paris during the 1820s, a decade which saw the premiere of Rossini’s Le
siège de Corinthe (1826), Berlioz’s Scène héroïque (La révolution grecque) (1828) as
well as vaudeville parodies, such as Le Dilettante, ou Le Siège de l’ Opéra (1826).
As sung by Rossini’s chorus of Greek warriors, le destin trahit nos vœux. 16
* * *
This volume has been the product of so many labors. First, we offer sincere
gratitude to all authors who submitted their valuable work and maintained
patience with their overworked editors. A sincere thank you is owed to Elise
Volkmann, former RIPM staff member, and current Ph.D. candidate at University
of California, Berkeley, and many other members of the RIPM family,
all of whose assistance proved invaluable. Michael Hüttler’s good cheer,
Sigrun Müller's superb attention to detail, and the professionalism of all at
Hollitzer Verlag made for a smooth production process. Finally, a very special
thank you to those who wished not to be named but provided an extra set of
eyes, advice, and help when called upon.
Benjamin Knysak
Baltimore, Maryland
August 2021
16 Gioacchino Rossini: Le siège de Corinthe. Libretto by Luigi Balocchi and Alexandre Soumet.
Act I, introduction to scene 1.
22

Musical Documentation of a “Forgotten Century” and Beyond
THE MUSICAL PRESS
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24
Introduction

A Ditty for a Friend: Honoring H. Robert Cohen through the Work of Zoila Lapique Becali
A DITTY FOR A FRIEND:
HONORING H. ROBERT COHEN THROUGH
THE WORK OF ZOILA LAPIQUE BECALI (B. 1930),
DOYENNE OF CUBA’S MUSICAL PRESS
Malena Kuss
University of North Texas (emeritus)
I don’t remember when or where I met H. Robert, but it must have been in
the 1980s, during the years I served as secretary of the International Association
of Music Libraries’s Bibliography Commission and lectured frequently
on matters bibliographical. Perhaps it was in Austin, in 1984, where I read a
paper on “Music in Cuba: A survey of research resources” at a Music Library
Association national meeting, or it could have been at the 1985 national meeting
of the four societies in Vancouver, where I presented a paper on “Traditional
elements in 19 th - and 20 th -century operas from Latin America and
the Caribbean.” What I do know is that our first meeting was followed by a
letter from H. Robert dated 16 August 1986, in which he asks me for Zoila
Lapique Becali’s address to invite her to participate in a RIPM session at the
forthcoming 1987 congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS)
that was to take place in Bologna (Fig. 1). By then I had been advertising
Zoila Lapique Becali’s extraordinary compendium, Música colonial cubana en
las publicaciones periódicas, Tomo I (1812–1902), published in Havana by Editorial
Letras Cubanas in 1979, which I had brought home from my first visit to Cuba
in 1982. About the planned second volume of Música colonial cubana, Zoila
Lapique Becali tells us the following in Cuba colonial: Música, compositores e
intérpretes 1570–1902, the 2007 compendium that took its place: “The present
book could have been the second volume of Música colonial cubana, published
in 1979 by Editorial Letras Cubanas, but because of the many ideas explored
during those intervening years, it took a life of its own.” 1
I would like to think that I introduced H. Robert to this formidable figure
in the field of print culture in Cuba. However, the invitation to Bologna did
not materialize, because they met for the first time in Havana, on March 18,
2014, at a session of all four Répertoires held during the first conference of the
newly founded IMS Regional Association for Latin America and the Caribbe-
1 Zoila Lapique Becali, Cuba colonial: Música, compositores e intérpretes 1570–1902 (La Habana:
Publicaciones de la Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad—Ediciones Boloña, 2007), 9.
25

Malena Kuss
Fig. 1. Letter from H. Robert Cohen to Malena Kuss, 16 August 1986, concerning an invitation
for Zoila Lapique Becali to the International Musicological Society Congress in Bologna.
an that took place at Casa de las Américas March 17–21, 2014. A lovely photo
of them (Fig. 2) engrossed in conversation documents the encounter of RIPM
with the great music librarian who created her own version of writing history
through the prism of the musical press.
26