Category: Uncategorized

  • Call and Response

    Call-and-response form is a structure imported to the Americas by enslaved African people in the seventeenth century. A brief history: A prison work song: (“Hammer, Ring,” Jesse Bradley and group, State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas, 1930s) A spiritual: “Talking ‘Bout a Good Time” (Moving Star Hall Singers, 1967) A sharecroppers’ work song: (“Arwhoolie,” Thomas J. Marshall,…

  • Piping Down the Valleys Wild: Some Literary and Historical Sources

    The title page of Songs of Innocence (1793) by William Blake (1757-1827). You can view the entire 1793 edition and read commentary at the Tate Museum’s website. An 1802 poem along similar lines by William Wordsworth (1770-1850): My heart leaps up when I behold   A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life…

  • Gypsy Kings

    The verbunkos, a Hungarian Roma dance. The musician is playing a gajda, a free-reed pipes made from goatskin (the goat’s head is still attached!). The third movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major. The young Brahms first heard Roma music as a boy in Hamburg, which, as a major port on the North Sea, was a way-station…

  • He Who Knows Longing

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a traveling robe on a trip to Italy. In 1795, Goethe published his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), a Bildungsroman (novel concerned with the growth of the individual human spirit) about a young merchant who, dissatisfied with his life in business, goes off to join a group of traveling street…

  • “Yes, Brahms is evil . . .”

    I do not know who wrote the short-lived and now-defunct-blog called Nihilism, Optimism, and Everything In Between. I found this piece a long time ago, and I’m very glad that the author hasn’t taken it down. It is about Brahms’s profoundly Romantic, deeply moving Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, op. 15: Brahms, you…

  • Free, But Lonely

    (Joseph Joachim in 1868.) “Frei Aber Einsam” — Free but lonely — was the personal motto of Brahms’s best friend, the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. In 1853, for Joachim’s twenty-seconnd birthday, Robert Schumann, his composition student Albert Dietrich, and Brahms decided to collaborate on a present for their friend: a sonata for violin and piano…

  • The Blue Flower

    (Clara Wieck Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Robert Schumann.) On October 1, 1853, the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms, who was on tour accompanying violinist Eduard Remenyi throughout the German-speaking lands, knocked on the door of his idol, Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf. He played his Piano Sonata no. 1 in C Major for Schumann and his wife, the…

  • The Hobgoblin of Little Minds

    A hobgoblin is, in European folklore, a spirit of the hearth or fireside (the “hob”). Hobgoblins are considered meddlesome and mischievous beings. In the universe of Marvel Comics, the Hobgoblin is one of Spiderman’s nemeses. In his well-known 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” the American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that “A foolish consistency is the…

  • Spirituals, Black English, and the Sonic Color Line

    Map of American English dialects. On July 5, 2018,  The Nation, a left-leaning magazine of politics and culture founded in 1865, published a poem on its website called “How-To.” The poem, meant to be an ironic critique of the limits of white liberal compassion, uses what is called in the field of linguistics African-American Vernacular English…

  • Calinda

    The earliest-known published book of African-American music, the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States, is primarily devoted to the religious vocal music of the slaves of the eastern seaboard. However, there are several songs at the end that are of a very different nature. These songs are in French and were collected in Louisiana, and…