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In 2009, I completed my second opera, La Castrata, a project which had absorbed me, off and on, since 1995. In this one-act opera based on Norman Shapiro's 1994 adaptation of Le Soprano, an 1831 comédie-vaudeville by Eugène Scribe and Mélesville, the word voice occurs 26 times in the libretto. The work was nevertheless composed in blissful ignorance of the theme of this volume, and I think this was probably a good thing. Creating music for characters, words, text, and dramatic situations, does not leave much time to deal with meta-textual issues such as 'voice', though composers may do so un-(or sub-)consciously. Voices, however, are at the heart of opera. This has attracted a great deal of attention, though little of it from composers themselves. In my opera, the plot leads to voices having additional levels and dimensions, for example, the title character is a soprano who, for complicated reasons, dresses up as a man and pretends to be a castrato. What is/are his/her possible voice(s)? And how are they to be made present (reified) to performers and listeners? Retrospectively analyzing my score, I realized that my work as librettist entailed a somewhat different voice than my work as a composer. I began by looking at aspects of voice as they appear in Shapiro's adaptation, and at how I 'reverse engineered' this to create a libretto with more in common, structurally, stylistically and lexically, with the original play, recovering to some extent Scribe's voice. And what of the composer's voice? However that is defined or understood, I contend that it exists in a kind of choric simultaneity, occurring at the same time and in the same musical lines as other voices, but no more separable from them than voices in a choir can be separated into a multitude of musical lines sung by individual singers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Bach-Gesellschaft was founded in 1850, could its organizers have Known that their 'objective' actions and intents would not be taken kindly by much of subjectively-minded musical Europe? Within the decade, a polemical public debate about the Bearbeitungsfrage (issue of arrangements and transcriptions) arose around the very nature and goals of the emerging discipline of musicology. Early editors such as Phillip Spitta and Friedrich Chrysander often found critical support for their work in progressive figures such as Joachim, Brahms, and Eduard Hanslick. The opposition was led by the composer Robert Franz, and supported by (among others) Franz Liszt. They derided the 'most recent alliance' of Spitta and Chrysander, characterizing them as mere 'archeologists', musical incompetents who were vandalizing great art and producing useless, unperformable editions, In the period 1860 to 1890, Franz's 'artistic' school (which included his acolytes, Julius Schaeffer, Albert Hahn, and Otto Dresel) published rival editions of Baroque works with full scores, vocal scores, and instrumental parts, some of which were still in print well into the 20th century. By the end of the 19th century, the debate had died down, along with its principal authors. But the issues raised remained, as the tensions surrounding performances in the past fifty years by Glenn Gould and Angela Hewitt may remind us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lied transcription holds an important place at the intersection of repertoire building, virtuosity, pedagogy, and music commodification in the mid-nineteenth century. Franz Liszt established the lied transcription in the 1830s as a sub-genre, deftly styling his arrangements of works by Schubert, Schumann, Robert Franz and others, as 'conscientious translations' of their originals. Liszt's conscience notwithstanding, lied transcriptions have frequently been scorned either as 'derangements' -- owing to the suppression of the literary/poetic text and frequent embellishment and extension of the original score -- or as hopelessly inadequate expressive vehicles due to the compression of material and omission of timbral resources. In fact these arrangements are often misrepresented: they are not all virtuoso vehicles, or vandalizations which cashed in on a lucrative if fleeting market for novelties. By removing the personality of the singer, as well as the sung text, these transcriptions paradoxically increase the focus of both performers and listeners on the composed reading of the text, and on the musical text itself. In doing so, they create a transgeneric corpus of works, ones which present 'expressive remainders' of their originals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on papers about the adaptation of music into literary narrative and another on opera.

Focuses on essays on music and words that reflect the interests of professor Steven Paul Scher in the theory and methodology of interdisciplinary studies and in cultivating a balance between critical theory and interpretive practice.