Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

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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 <strong>Cohen</strong> 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 <strong>Cohen</strong> 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
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