Leseprobe_Festschrift Cohen

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
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