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Summer 2001

Sister acts: Peter Williams considers the state of modern musicology

In memoriam

We pay tribute to Rita Hunter, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Graziela Sciutti and Norman Kay.

Articles in print

Three for all Arnold Whittall examines the recent music of Louis Andriessen: The 1990s was a productive decade for Andriessen, with the completion of three substantial scores: Rosa (a horse drama) (1993–94), Trilogy of the last day (begun in 1993, but mainly composed in 1996–97), and the opera Writing to Vermeer (1997–99). All three offer that characteristic Andriessonian blend of the spontaneous and the self-conscious, as fully-fledged responses to the now-constant cultural fact ‘that all interesting music deals with existing music, and that you are always in a polemical relationship with existing music’.

Italian impressions Allan W. Atlas follows the musical footsteps of George Gissing: 1 December [1888] found Gissing at Rome, where he soon made his way to the Pincio. There ‘a good band was playing’, he wrote to Eduard Bertz on 6 December (Letters, vol.3, p.314), while some days later (17 December), he told his sister Margaret that the band played several times a week (Letters, vol.3, p.322).

Life is beautiful Christopher Fox introduces the music of Richard Ayres: Gleefully my hosts explained that this wasn’t folk music but a piece called MacGowan by Richard Ayres, that it was scored for bagpipes, viola and harp and had been played to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands when she opened a new building in the Hague in 1991.

Tracking Tomkins John Milsom reclaims three anthems by the seventeenth-century English master: All are works of substance, and one of them is very significant indeed; it is Tomkins’s longest known anthem, probably written at the end of the composer’s life in distressing circumstances.

Remembering Scelsi Franco Sciannameo recalls his association with the Italian recluse

Review articles

Élite encounters Andrew Thomson appraises an instant classic of music biography in Berlioz, volume two: servitude and greatness 1832–1869, by David Cairns; also under review is The Cambridge companion to Berlioz, edited by Peter Bloom.

The play’s the thing Peter Phillips ponders the relationship between recordings and performance practice in a review of Timothy Day’s A century of recorded music: listening to musical history.

Books reviewed this issue

Voices and vices Arnold Whittall on Reviving the muse: essays on music after modernism, edited by Peter Davison; and The voice of music: conversations with composers of our time, by Anders Beyer (edited and translated by Jean Christensen & Anders Beyer)

All change Richard Drakeford on Handel’s muse: patterns of creation in his oratorios and musical dramas, 1743–1751, by David Ross Hurley

In the doll’s house David Wright on Sviatoslav Richter: notebooks and conversations, by Bruno Monsaingeon

Endangered species? Michael Fuller on A history of the oratorio, volume 4: the oratorio in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by Howard E. Smither