Papers by Zdravko Blazekovic
Imago musicae, 2024
In the eighteenth century many Dutch organizations and individuals amassed significant collection... more In the eighteenth century many Dutch organizations and individuals amassed significant collections of Chinese objects, although none of them came close in size and variety to the one assembled by the lawyer, antiquarian and proto-sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807). He never visited China, but dedicated years of his life to learning the Chinese language, history and culture. Between 1765 and 1780 he collected objects related to all aspects of Chinese life to use them as the basis of a dictionary of the Chinese language. Besides various realia that arrived mostly from Canton, he owned a set of fifteen watercolor paintings, showing eighty Chinese musical instruments, each annotated with its name written in Chinese. When these paintings arrived in The Hague in the 1770s, this collection became the most extensive encyclopedic survey of Chinese instruments in Europe. However, since the pictures (today kept at the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden) were in Royer’s private collection and never published, they remained unknown to sinologists and music historians. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Royer obtained the paintings from a trader in Canton, Carolus Wang, with whom he corresponded and who sent him some other objects, books and pictures. Wang was also a source of information for the English music historian Charles Burney, who communicated with him via Matthew Raper. Raper, an English trader with the East India Company, owned a collection of Chinese instruments which may have been represented in these pictures, and some of the depicted instruments may have eventually ended up with Burney.
The Lyre as a Symbol, 2023
黄钟: 中国 • 武汉音乐学院学报 = Huangzhong: Journal of Wuhan Conservatory of Music, 2023
The world of music scholarship today is broadly divided into five linguistic megaregions: most of... more The world of music scholarship today is broadly divided into five linguistic megaregions: most of Europe with North America (dominated by the English language), the Iberian Peninsula with Latin America (dominated by Spanish), Russia with Central Asia (dominated by Russian), East Asia (dominated by Chinese), and Arabic countries/Iran. Very generally speaking, each region is self-contained, maintaining its own gravitational forces. Anglo-American scholarly networks are perceived as arbiters of global scholarly relevance, despite the fact that they often ignore developments current in other linguistic regions. The aggregators of altmetrics data and citation indexes are significantly biased toward literature published in English. In the context of such scholarly inequality and the dominance of English-language literature, the mission of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) since its foundation in 1967 has been to create global tools for music scholarship. At this postglobal time of protectionism and social closure, RILM sees its social responsibility to be more important than ever and remains committed to building a truly global network for the dissemination of music research.
The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits, 2023
Musicology and Its Future in Times of Cristis, 2022
The world of music scholarship today is broadly divided into five linguistic megaregions: most of... more The world of music scholarship today is broadly divided into five linguistic megaregions: most of Europe with North America (dominated by the English language), the Iberian Peninsula with Latin America (dominated by Spanish), Russia with Central Asia (dominated by Russian), East Asia (dominated by Chinese), and Arabic countries/Iran. Very generally speaking, each region is self-contained, maintaining its own gravitational forces. Anglo-American scholarly networks are perceived as arbiters of global scholarly relevance, despite the fact that they often ignore developments current in other linguistic regions. The aggregators of altmetrics data and citation indexes are significantly biased toward literature published in English. In the context of such scholarly inequality and the dominance of English-language literature, the mission of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) since its foundation in 1967 has been to create global tools for music scholarship. At this postglobal time of protectionism and social closure, RILM sees its social responsibility to be more important than ever and remains committed to building a truly global network for the dissemination of music research.
Celebrating the International Council for Traditional Music: Reflections on the first seven decades, 2022
Musical history as seen through contemporary eyes: Essays in honor of H. Robert Cohen, 2021
Receiving his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1959, subsequently teaching at the Université de Paris... more Receiving his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1959, subsequently teaching at the Université de Paris (1967–68), and frequently visiting Paris doing his research there, the American musicologist Barry S. Brook was well familiar with the long tradition of research in music iconography in France and the strong disciplinary advancements progressing there during the 1960s. Particularly significant was the founding in 1967 of the Laboratoire d’organologie et d’iconographie musicale at the CNRS by Geneviève Thibault, comtesse du Chambure (1902–75), which had at the time a unique place in the world, focusing on the research of visual sources for music. Recognizing Laboratoire’s significance and the goals of comtesse du Chambure, in 1971 Brook initiated with her and Harald Heckmann founding of the Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM). Following the earlier model of RISM and RILM, RIdIM was meant to gather cataloguing data through a network of its national centers. To coordinate their activities, in 1972 Brook founded at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Research Center for Music Iconography (RCMI), which functioned as both the U.S. national RIdIM center and the international central office maintaining the master catalogue of cards produced by other national centers. Under Brook’s guidance, RCMI worked on formulating the methods for RIdIM’s cataloguing of music iconography, organized the first eight conferences of RIdIM (1973–80), produced inventories of music iconography in five U.S. collections (1986–91), and initiated founding of RIdIM’s yearbook <Imago musicae> (1984) under the guidance of Tilman Seebass. Brook also invited to the CUNY Graduate Center Emanuel Winternitz, after his retiring as the curator of the Music Instrument Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Winternitz, who has produced since the 1950s ground-braking studies on interpreting music references in visual sources, offered classes at the CUNY Graduate Center during the 1970s.
Helicon resonans: Studi in onore di Alberto Basso per il suo 90° compleanno, 2021
The tradition of representing mythology on theater curtains continued in its various artistic tra... more The tradition of representing mythology on theater curtains continued in its various artistic transformations throughout the 18th century, with two topoi continuously reappearing: Apollo shown as the god of music, song, and dance, and a companion of the Muses who look over human artistic creativity; and Dionysus, accompanied by his maenads, as the god of theater and festivities. The Piedmontese painter and stage designer Giovanni Battista Crosato (1686–1758) designed the compositions <Diogenes looking for a man> and <Sacrifice of Ifigenia>, both preserved in sketches, presumably for curtains of unidentified theaters. A generation younger scenographer Bernardino Galliari (1707–94) designed in 1753 the curtains for the Teatro Carignano in Turin, showing <The fall of Phaeton> and for the theater in Casale Monferrato, <Apollo riding the coach of the Sun>. The interior of the old Teatro Regio in Turin is known from a detailed painting attributed to Giovanni Michele Graneri (1708–1762), produced only a few years from the stage curtain painted in 1756 by Bernardino Galliari, showing <The wedding of Bacchus and Ariadne>. The contemporaneity of the two works allows us to combine them in order to experience the theatrical space when the original stage curtain was lowered. The composition of the second curtain of La Scala (at Museo Teatrale alla Scala) is known from the preliminary sketch in tempera on canvas, painted by Angelo Monticelli in 1821. The composition is blending the representation of mythology showing Apollo and the muses, with a representation of the allegories of the Italian arts and sciences, announcing the future unification of Italy.
Itineraria: Letteratura di viaggio e conoscenza del mondo dall'Antichità al Rinascimento, 2021
The German mathematician, cartographer and explorer Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) joined in 1761 th... more The German mathematician, cartographer and explorer Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) joined in 1761 the Royal Danish Arabia Expedition, organized by King Frederick V of Denmark (1723–1766), and visited Egypt, Jidda, Yemen, Bombay and Gujarat, Muscat, Shiraz, Persepolis, Basra, Mosul, Kerbela, Baghdad, Aleppo, Palestine, and Damascus, returning back to Copenhagen in 1767. After the expedition Niebuhr wrote a three-volume account of the expedition, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern (1774, 1778, 1837). In the first volume is included a fold-out plate representing eighteen musical instruments, he encountered played mostly by the Greek and Egyptian musicians in Cairo. Niebuhr repeatedly mentioned in the book that he did not appreciate music which he heard in Egypt and Yemen. He thought that it was badly performed and simplistic, and musicians inferior to the European ones since they have not used music notation in performing.
As the earliest representation of such a large group of the Arabic instruments in a European publication and a rare description of the Arabic music and dance, Niebuhr’s views were influential on the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European stereotyping of the Arabic music. In addition that his integral work was published to French, Danish, English, and Dutch translations, the chapter about the Arabic music was excerpted in Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek by Johann Nicolaus Forkel (1778), Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. II: Des instrumens by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde (1780, with reengraved pictures), Elementarbuch der Tonkunst zum Unterricht beim Klavier für Lehrende und Lernende mit praktischen Beispielen by Johann Friedrich Christmann (1789), Moeurs, usages, costumes des Othomans, et abrége de leur histoire by Antoine-Laurent Castellan (1812; with reengraved pictures); and Der Clavierbau in seiner Theorie, Technik und Geschichte by Heinrich Welcker von Gontershaufen (1864). Giovanni Battista Toderini produced a significant criticism of Niebuhr’s text in his Letteratura turchesca (1787).
Musique, Images, Instruments: Revue française d’organologie et d’iconographie musicale, 2021
The gusle has been a powerful symbolic marker of authentic, vernacular nationalism for Dinaric pe... more The gusle has been a powerful symbolic marker of authentic, vernacular nationalism for Dinaric people of the Balkans. This one-stringed bowed instrument of limited tonal range is used to accompany performances of epic songs. During the Croatian national movement of the 1830s-40s, the emblematic symbolism of the instrument radiated the South Slavic sense of ethnic unity. The Croatian urban classes developed a taste for improvised traditional epics, but also for the newly composed patriotic poetry imitating their style. Accordingly, the instrument itself became a frequent and revered topos for painters, with representations ranging from the realistic to the symbolic, included in places such as the masthead of the Vienac, the main Croatian weekly magazine for literature and culture; the stage curtain of the national theatre in Zagreb; and historicist paintings commissioned to decorate public places. Such symbolical usage of the gusle continued after the foundation of the Yugoslav state in 1918, when the motif began to carry a Yugoslav national meaning. This changed in the mid-twentieth century when the instrument became a nationalistic symbol appropriated by each nation for its own propaganda, leading to the most extreme situation in the Bosnian war of 1991-95, when the Serbian brigades included a permanent military guslar, responsible for rising the fighting spirit. As modern epics address less historical subjects and talk more about current political, religious and social issues, the decoration on the gusle’s neck—which was in the nineteenth century usually plain—developed into a fanciful visual symbolism complimenting the nationalism, heroism, patriotism and resistance, addressed in the recited verses. In the nineteenth century the symbolism of the gusle was reflected through its depictions and literary metaphors; in the later part of the twentieth century the instrument itself became an object carrying a symbolic message.
TheMA: Theatre, Music, Arts, 2019
During the early part of the eighteenth century the Franciscan Provincia Bosnae Argentinae covere... more During the early part of the eighteenth century the Franciscan Provincia Bosnae Argentinae covered the wide geographical space of Bosnia, Slavonia, Srem, and Dalmatia, extending also to Hungary and Transylvania. After the first secession of 1735, monasteries in Dalmatia formed the new Provincia Sanctissimi Redemptoris, and following the second secession of 1757 monasteries in Slavonia, southern Hungary, Transylvania, and Vojvodina formed the Provincia S. Joannis a Capistrano.
The most prominent music personality in the Slavonian monasteries in the first half of the eighteenth century was Filip Vlahović from Kaposvár (Philippo à Kapusuar, Philip Kapusvaracz; before 1700–1755), a multitalented artist who compiled, wrote, and exquisitely decorated anthologies of liturgical music, also composing some of the included Masses and hymns.
In 1750–1751 the general definitor of the Provincia Bosnae Argentinae, Josip Janković (ca. 1710–1757), commissioned liturgical books for all the monasteries in the province from Giuseppe Maria Cordans (1694–1766), who worked at the monastery of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. These were large-sized volumes, all with an identical repertoire of thirteen Masses mostly dedicated to the Franciscan saints, one Requiem, and three Tantum ergo settings for vocal solo/tutti performance. The accompanying organ part with figured bass in the style of late-Baroque monody was written separately. This repertoire was performed until the liturgical reforms of Maria Theresa in 1776 and Joseph II in 1785, who introduced simple Singmessen sung in the vernacular.
Musiques, Images, Instruments: Mélanges en l'honneur de Florence Gétreau, 2019
Chinese objects were throughout the eighteenth century the most admired and desired items by the ... more Chinese objects were throughout the eighteenth century the most admired and desired items by the European collectors of the highest rank, and many aristocratic palaces included a Chinese room or a garden pavilion. In these places the true Chinese and the fictional Chinese crossed path. While the Prussian royal palace in Berlin included one room with original Chinese lacquer paneling, and another full of genuine Chinese porcelain of the highest quality collected since the late seventeenth century, King Friedrich der Grosse (1712–86) built between 1755 and 1864 at his summer palace in Potsdam a tea pavilion in an entirely fictional Chinese style. A short supply of true Chinese objects and strong interest for them created an artistic space for the creation of fictionalized imagery of China (chinoiseries).
Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names.
We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).
Ensayos: Historia y teoría del arte, 2019
Various forms of religious radicalism, extreme nationalism, ethnic expulsions, and ill-conceived ... more Various forms of religious radicalism, extreme nationalism, ethnic expulsions, and ill-conceived policies of the political and military superpowers have provoked armed conflicts in recent years with large-scale destruction of tangible and intangible heritage, making the preservation of this heritage a critically urgent issue. And yet, our international music societies (IMS, ICTM, IAML), and other international music networks, keep pursuing their long-established missions without change or reaction to the changing world around them. Why are our societies not reassessing tools or practices which may be needed in order to raise awareness about, and to respond to, the destruction of heritage that is underway, and to advance actions for the preservation and protection of endangered musical practices and monuments in peril? When it comes to the organization of social interactions and preservation efforts, international music networks are far behind the networks of art historians, archaeological institutions, or encyclopedic museums (such as the Louvre, Metropolitan Museum, and British Museum). In the last years even, international political organizations have started dealing with cultural heritage atrocities in a radically new way. For example, the Resolution 2100 (2013) of the United Nations Security Council included for the first time the safeguarding of cultural heritage as part of the mandate of a peace mission, and in 2016, for the first time, the International Criminal Court established that the destruction of religious sites is a war crime.
This paper proposes a new advocacy role for international societies of music scholars and other music networks in the preservation of endangered musical heritage, borrowing possible models from the art and museum world, and implementing methods developed in heritage diplomacy – defined as “a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance” – which has been effectively included in the toolbox of bilateral political diplomacy for a long time.
中央音乐学院学报 = Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music, 2019
Chinese objects were throughout the eighteenth century the most admired and desired items by the ... more Chinese objects were throughout the eighteenth century the most admired and desired items by the European collectors of the highest rank, and many aristocratic palaces included a Chinese room or a garden pavilion. In these places the true Chinese and the fictional Chinese crossed path. While the Prussian royal palace in Berlin included one room with original Chinese lacquer paneling, and another full of genuine Chinese porcelain of the highest quality collected since the late seventeenth century, King Friedrich der Grosse (1712–86) built between 1755 and 1864 at his summer palace in Potsdam a tea pavilion in an entirely fictional Chinese style. A short supply of true Chinese objects and strong interest for them created an artistic space for the creation of fictionalized imagery of China (chinoiseries).
Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names.
We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).
Challenges in Contemporary Musicology: Essays in Honor of Prof. Dr. Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman = Izazovi savremene muzikologije: Eseji u čast prof. dr Mirjane Veselinović-Hofman, 2018
Various forms of religious radicalism, extreme nationalism, ethnic expulsions, and ill-conceived ... more Various forms of religious radicalism, extreme nationalism, ethnic expulsions, and ill-conceived policies of the political and military superpowers have provoked armed conflicts in recent years with large-scale destruction of tangible and intangible heritage, making the preservation of this heritage a critically urgent issue. And yet, our international music societies (IMS, ICTM, IAML), and other international music networks, keep pursuing their long-established missions without change or reaction to the changing world around them. Why are our societies not reassessing tools or practices which may be needed in order to raise awareness about, and to respond to, the destruction of heritage that is underway, and to advance actions for the preservation and protection of endangered musical practices and monuments in peril? When it comes to the organization of social interactions and preservation efforts, international music networks are far behind the networks of art historians, archaeological institutions, or encyclopedic museums (such as the Louvre, Metropolitan Museum, and British Museum). In the last years even, international political organizations have started dealing with cultural heritage atrocities in a radically new way. For example, the Resolution 2100 (2013) of the United Nations Security Council included for the first time the safeguarding of cultural heritage as part of the mandate of a peace mission, and in 2016, for the first time, the International Criminal Court established that the destruction of religious sites is a war crime.
This paper proposes a new advocacy role for international societies of music scholars and other music networks in the preservation of endangered musical heritage, borrowing possible models from the art and museum world, and implementing methods developed in heritage diplomacy – defined as “a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance” – which has been effectively included in the toolbox of bilateral political diplomacy for a long time.
Musicological Brainfood, Oct 1, 2018
Late Eighteenth-Century Music and Visual Culture, 2017
In April 1773, Charles Burney advertised his forthcoming <General history of music from the earli... more In April 1773, Charles Burney advertised his forthcoming <General history of music from the earliest ages to the present period>, emphasizing that the book would be illustrated "with original drawings of ancient and modern instruments, engraved by the best artists". When the project was completed and all four volumes published between 1776 and 1789, only the first volume, discussing the music of antiquity, included engraved plates of instruments, while the later volumes had only mythological fantasies engraved by an Italian artist living in London, Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815). The three plates with instruments included in the first volume--produced by the French engraver Pierre Maleuvre (1740–1803) and the English-Italian engraver Charles Grignion (1745–1810), a specialist in representations of antiquity and the production of large historical compositions--show a variety of instruments mostly adapted from archaeological monuments that Burney had seen during his visit to Naples and Rome in 1770.
Almost a third of the instruments included are based on wall paintings excavated at Herculaneum about 20 to 30 years before Burney’s visit, making him the first music historian to use this archaeological material as a source for ancient organology. Except for the two Greek red-figure vases from the collection of William Hamilton, Burney documented Greco-Roman organology exclusively with iconographic sources native to southern Italy, not realizing that his overview was unbalanced since he was missing Greek instruments dating to the Classical period. From Burney’s volume, drawings of instruments were in different ways adapted in later music histories, for example Jean-Benjamin de La Borde’s <Essay sur la musique ancienne> (1780) and Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s <Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik> (1788), and images of six lyres became iconic through the broadly disseminated <Encyclopaedia Britannica>, where they appeared between its third edition of 1788–97 and the sixth edition of 1820–23.
Although taken from Burney, each of these editions treated his images in different ways. In about half of drawings, Burney took only the instrument, showing it as an object unattached to the originally-shown musician. La Borde adapted Burney’s instruments by placing them back into hands of (fictional) musicians unrelated to the musicians on the original artworks. Forkel, in turn, again presented instruments only as isolated objects. In approaching visual sources of ancient instruments and music making, Burney mediated between the influences of recent archaeological research and discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which brought to the fore a renewed aspiration for historical accuracy in the presentation of ancient sources, and the centuries-old tradition relating ancient music to mythological stories, which is reflected in Bartolozzi’s engravings of mythological scenes related to music.
Music in Art: Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography, 2017
Theater buildings and concert halls are not only spaces providing conditions for the performance,... more Theater buildings and concert halls are not only spaces providing conditions for the performance, but in a specific way they also communicate with the audience, performers, and passers-by on the street. With their monumental facades, busts of musical heroes distributed through foyers and staircases, or painted stage curtains, these places also conserve our cultural memory and foster our national identity. They are places created as architectural artworks in their own right, most often commissioned from the best architects at the pinnacle of their artistic careers. As any temple, the opera house imposes on its visitors a particular rules of conduct and dress code; it has its rituals observed by performers on the stage and in their dressing rooms, its managers in offices and musicians in the orchestra pit, as well as its visitors who become part of this implicit performance without ever stepping on the stage. This communication between the building, audience, and performers has been changing over the centuries, and the architectural designs of the past communicate with us today in a very different ways than they had communicated with the audiences at the time when they were built. Behaviour patterns, which architects had in mind for the original audiences, do not exist anymore; old signage of political power distributed in visually strategic places through the auditoria and hallways have lost their original meaning, and now are replaced and supplemented with new decorative models. Layers of different meanings have been amalgamated in the architecture of our theaters and concert halls, and it is our task to assess them and understand how they have communicated in the past and communicate now.
Best of isaScience. 2013-2016: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on Music and Arts, 2017
Orient-Archäologie 37: Klang—Objekt—Kultur—Geschichte, 2016
Among Hornbostel’s and Sachs’s rare 19th-century predecessors working on the organology and class... more Among Hornbostel’s and Sachs’s rare 19th-century predecessors working on the organology and classification of instruments belongs the Croatian music historian, folklorist and organologist Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834–1911), whose work on instruments Curt Sachs later repeatedly cited. Based on his fieldwork among the South Slavs done from 1857 to 1870, as well as his own collection of mainly Croatian traditional instruments, Kuhač wrote a 370-page systematic survey of instruments, Prilog za povjest glasbe južnoslovjenske: Kulturno-historijska studija (A contribution to the music history of the South Slavs: Cultural and historical study; 1877–82). Here he developed his own classification of sound sources based on the principles of sound production: 1: chordophones (a. bowed; b. plucked; c. hammered); 2: aerophones (a. end-blown flutes; b. side-blown flutes; c. single and double reeds; d. horns and trumpets; e. instruments with a bag or bellows); 3: free-reed instruments; 4: membranophones; 5: idiophones; and 6: bells.
Guided by the view that all sound sources are an integral part of traditional music culture and social context, the starting point in Kuhač’s definition of instruments was their social function. This approach led him to include in his survey a large number of the simplest idiophones (rattles and jingles) and aerophones (whistles). His investigation of instruments was the broadest possible and besides descriptions of their technical characteristics, tuning, performance practice, and repertoire (providing transcriptions of tunes), it included a description of their social role, related Croatian/German terminology, and references to the instrument in traditional literature and proverbs. His research was based on comparative methodology borrowed from ethnology and linguistics, making him one of the founders of comparative organology.
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Papers by Zdravko Blazekovic
As the earliest representation of such a large group of the Arabic instruments in a European publication and a rare description of the Arabic music and dance, Niebuhr’s views were influential on the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European stereotyping of the Arabic music. In addition that his integral work was published to French, Danish, English, and Dutch translations, the chapter about the Arabic music was excerpted in Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek by Johann Nicolaus Forkel (1778), Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. II: Des instrumens by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde (1780, with reengraved pictures), Elementarbuch der Tonkunst zum Unterricht beim Klavier für Lehrende und Lernende mit praktischen Beispielen by Johann Friedrich Christmann (1789), Moeurs, usages, costumes des Othomans, et abrége de leur histoire by Antoine-Laurent Castellan (1812; with reengraved pictures); and Der Clavierbau in seiner Theorie, Technik und Geschichte by Heinrich Welcker von Gontershaufen (1864). Giovanni Battista Toderini produced a significant criticism of Niebuhr’s text in his Letteratura turchesca (1787).
The most prominent music personality in the Slavonian monasteries in the first half of the eighteenth century was Filip Vlahović from Kaposvár (Philippo à Kapusuar, Philip Kapusvaracz; before 1700–1755), a multitalented artist who compiled, wrote, and exquisitely decorated anthologies of liturgical music, also composing some of the included Masses and hymns.
In 1750–1751 the general definitor of the Provincia Bosnae Argentinae, Josip Janković (ca. 1710–1757), commissioned liturgical books for all the monasteries in the province from Giuseppe Maria Cordans (1694–1766), who worked at the monastery of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. These were large-sized volumes, all with an identical repertoire of thirteen Masses mostly dedicated to the Franciscan saints, one Requiem, and three Tantum ergo settings for vocal solo/tutti performance. The accompanying organ part with figured bass in the style of late-Baroque monody was written separately. This repertoire was performed until the liturgical reforms of Maria Theresa in 1776 and Joseph II in 1785, who introduced simple Singmessen sung in the vernacular.
Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names.
We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).
This paper proposes a new advocacy role for international societies of music scholars and other music networks in the preservation of endangered musical heritage, borrowing possible models from the art and museum world, and implementing methods developed in heritage diplomacy – defined as “a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance” – which has been effectively included in the toolbox of bilateral political diplomacy for a long time.
Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names.
We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).
This paper proposes a new advocacy role for international societies of music scholars and other music networks in the preservation of endangered musical heritage, borrowing possible models from the art and museum world, and implementing methods developed in heritage diplomacy – defined as “a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance” – which has been effectively included in the toolbox of bilateral political diplomacy for a long time.
Almost a third of the instruments included are based on wall paintings excavated at Herculaneum about 20 to 30 years before Burney’s visit, making him the first music historian to use this archaeological material as a source for ancient organology. Except for the two Greek red-figure vases from the collection of William Hamilton, Burney documented Greco-Roman organology exclusively with iconographic sources native to southern Italy, not realizing that his overview was unbalanced since he was missing Greek instruments dating to the Classical period. From Burney’s volume, drawings of instruments were in different ways adapted in later music histories, for example Jean-Benjamin de La Borde’s <Essay sur la musique ancienne> (1780) and Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s <Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik> (1788), and images of six lyres became iconic through the broadly disseminated <Encyclopaedia Britannica>, where they appeared between its third edition of 1788–97 and the sixth edition of 1820–23.
Although taken from Burney, each of these editions treated his images in different ways. In about half of drawings, Burney took only the instrument, showing it as an object unattached to the originally-shown musician. La Borde adapted Burney’s instruments by placing them back into hands of (fictional) musicians unrelated to the musicians on the original artworks. Forkel, in turn, again presented instruments only as isolated objects. In approaching visual sources of ancient instruments and music making, Burney mediated between the influences of recent archaeological research and discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which brought to the fore a renewed aspiration for historical accuracy in the presentation of ancient sources, and the centuries-old tradition relating ancient music to mythological stories, which is reflected in Bartolozzi’s engravings of mythological scenes related to music.
Guided by the view that all sound sources are an integral part of traditional music culture and social context, the starting point in Kuhač’s definition of instruments was their social function. This approach led him to include in his survey a large number of the simplest idiophones (rattles and jingles) and aerophones (whistles). His investigation of instruments was the broadest possible and besides descriptions of their technical characteristics, tuning, performance practice, and repertoire (providing transcriptions of tunes), it included a description of their social role, related Croatian/German terminology, and references to the instrument in traditional literature and proverbs. His research was based on comparative methodology borrowed from ethnology and linguistics, making him one of the founders of comparative organology.
As the earliest representation of such a large group of the Arabic instruments in a European publication and a rare description of the Arabic music and dance, Niebuhr’s views were influential on the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European stereotyping of the Arabic music. In addition that his integral work was published to French, Danish, English, and Dutch translations, the chapter about the Arabic music was excerpted in Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek by Johann Nicolaus Forkel (1778), Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. II: Des instrumens by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde (1780, with reengraved pictures), Elementarbuch der Tonkunst zum Unterricht beim Klavier für Lehrende und Lernende mit praktischen Beispielen by Johann Friedrich Christmann (1789), Moeurs, usages, costumes des Othomans, et abrége de leur histoire by Antoine-Laurent Castellan (1812; with reengraved pictures); and Der Clavierbau in seiner Theorie, Technik und Geschichte by Heinrich Welcker von Gontershaufen (1864). Giovanni Battista Toderini produced a significant criticism of Niebuhr’s text in his Letteratura turchesca (1787).
The most prominent music personality in the Slavonian monasteries in the first half of the eighteenth century was Filip Vlahović from Kaposvár (Philippo à Kapusuar, Philip Kapusvaracz; before 1700–1755), a multitalented artist who compiled, wrote, and exquisitely decorated anthologies of liturgical music, also composing some of the included Masses and hymns.
In 1750–1751 the general definitor of the Provincia Bosnae Argentinae, Josip Janković (ca. 1710–1757), commissioned liturgical books for all the monasteries in the province from Giuseppe Maria Cordans (1694–1766), who worked at the monastery of San Francesco della Vigna in Venice. These were large-sized volumes, all with an identical repertoire of thirteen Masses mostly dedicated to the Franciscan saints, one Requiem, and three Tantum ergo settings for vocal solo/tutti performance. The accompanying organ part with figured bass in the style of late-Baroque monody was written separately. This repertoire was performed until the liturgical reforms of Maria Theresa in 1776 and Joseph II in 1785, who introduced simple Singmessen sung in the vernacular.
Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names.
We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).
This paper proposes a new advocacy role for international societies of music scholars and other music networks in the preservation of endangered musical heritage, borrowing possible models from the art and museum world, and implementing methods developed in heritage diplomacy – defined as “a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance” – which has been effectively included in the toolbox of bilateral political diplomacy for a long time.
Just like the Chinese porcelain, European collectors were fond also of the Chinese musical instruments. There have been so far identified nine collectors of Chinese musical instruments in Europe before 1800. The French collector Marquis Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) owned a qing and sheng (today partially preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes); the English trader Henry Talbot (b.1700) owned a Chinese gong; Jean-Benjamin de La Borde included in his Essai sur la musique ancienne et modern (1780) a picture of four instruments from the “cabinet de M. le Duc de Chaulnes”; one of the most prominent rococo painters who produced incalculable Chinese scenes, Francois Boucher (1703–1770), owned Chinese instruments and other objects, and was also in touch with Jean Denis Attiret (王致誠; 1702–1768), painter to the Qianlong Emperor, who was sending him from Peking images of Chinese objects; the French statesman, secretary of state under Louis XV, and lieutenant general of the Paris police Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792) created a collection of instruments which was sent to him from Peking by the Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot (錢德明; 1718–1793); Charles Burney has acquired a number of instruments from China, which served as a basis for his article on Chinese music in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819); the Dutch proto-Sinologist Jean Theodore Royer (1737-1807 collected a number of instruments, along with a series of twelve gouache paintings depicting 76 musical instruments of the Chinese, accompanied by the indication of their names.
We also know about the two earliest Chinese musicians traveling in Europe: Michael Alphonsius Shen Fu-Tsung 沈福宗 (ca. 1658–1691) traveled in Europe from 1865 until his death, and Francesco Bianchini in his De tribus generibus instrumentorum musicae veterum published a picture of the sheng Shen played in Rome in 1865. London's Gentleman's Magazine for January 1757 published “Chinese air, with some account of the Mandarine, now in London”. The Mandarine was Loum Kiqua who performed on the south Chinese fretted lute qinqin (秦琴).
This paper proposes a new advocacy role for international societies of music scholars and other music networks in the preservation of endangered musical heritage, borrowing possible models from the art and museum world, and implementing methods developed in heritage diplomacy – defined as “a set of processes whereby cultural and natural pasts shared between and across nations become subject to exchanges, collaborations and forms of cooperative governance” – which has been effectively included in the toolbox of bilateral political diplomacy for a long time.
Almost a third of the instruments included are based on wall paintings excavated at Herculaneum about 20 to 30 years before Burney’s visit, making him the first music historian to use this archaeological material as a source for ancient organology. Except for the two Greek red-figure vases from the collection of William Hamilton, Burney documented Greco-Roman organology exclusively with iconographic sources native to southern Italy, not realizing that his overview was unbalanced since he was missing Greek instruments dating to the Classical period. From Burney’s volume, drawings of instruments were in different ways adapted in later music histories, for example Jean-Benjamin de La Borde’s <Essay sur la musique ancienne> (1780) and Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s <Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik> (1788), and images of six lyres became iconic through the broadly disseminated <Encyclopaedia Britannica>, where they appeared between its third edition of 1788–97 and the sixth edition of 1820–23.
Although taken from Burney, each of these editions treated his images in different ways. In about half of drawings, Burney took only the instrument, showing it as an object unattached to the originally-shown musician. La Borde adapted Burney’s instruments by placing them back into hands of (fictional) musicians unrelated to the musicians on the original artworks. Forkel, in turn, again presented instruments only as isolated objects. In approaching visual sources of ancient instruments and music making, Burney mediated between the influences of recent archaeological research and discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which brought to the fore a renewed aspiration for historical accuracy in the presentation of ancient sources, and the centuries-old tradition relating ancient music to mythological stories, which is reflected in Bartolozzi’s engravings of mythological scenes related to music.
Guided by the view that all sound sources are an integral part of traditional music culture and social context, the starting point in Kuhač’s definition of instruments was their social function. This approach led him to include in his survey a large number of the simplest idiophones (rattles and jingles) and aerophones (whistles). His investigation of instruments was the broadest possible and besides descriptions of their technical characteristics, tuning, performance practice, and repertoire (providing transcriptions of tunes), it included a description of their social role, related Croatian/German terminology, and references to the instrument in traditional literature and proverbs. His research was based on comparative methodology borrowed from ethnology and linguistics, making him one of the founders of comparative organology.
序：开启文明的对话：对东西方之间音乐图像学的研究 [Introduction: Opening the Dialogue: Research of Music Iconography between East and West]
BOGUNOVIĆ, Marko, dance amateur (19th century) |
CIGALA, Giovanni, composer, harpsichordist and conductor (Padova, ca. 1805 — Zadar, 15. VI 1857) |
CONTARINI, Albina, née. Zajc, soprano (Rijeka, 10. XII 1837 — Milano, 1894) |
KIRSCHHOFER, Antun, violinist, composer and conductor (Pest, 1807 — Zagreb, 1849)
Certainly international music societies are not institutions that should be involved as primary initiators of the preservation of such sites, but they should have a broader interest in current needs, initiatives, actions, goals and achievements mediated by the national and international networks involved with the cultural preservation and contribute to them needed music expertise. The societies could delegate the execution of this task to their specific study groups and the joint commissions.
and conferences and celebrations organized by state institutions.
The aim of the scholarly event at the University of Padua, therefore, is to offer an opportunity for a dialogue among Italian and foreign scholars, from a multidisciplinary perspective, and which is specifically centered on the visual and textual representations of music making as reported in travel literature
L’interesse per la storia della musica “altra” rispetto a quella della “vecchia” Europa si è concretizzato in diverse tavole rotonde, convegni e pubblicazioni. Ne è emersa chiaramente la necessità di ricostruire la storia musicale, a partire dall’Antichità sino al Medioevo e all’Età moderna, di quelle civiltà non europee che spesso non hanno tramandato la loro tradizione musicale attraverso la notazione scritta e/o la trattatistica musicale, ma che si sono affidate principalmente alla trasmissione orale. Questa tematica di ricerca è diventata oggetto di studio dei musicologi, ma anche degli storici e antropologi interessati alla ricostruzione di una storia della musica come forma di espressione dell’uomo.
L’appuntamento padovano vuole costituirsi pertanto quale occasione privilegiata di dialogo sul tema, mettendo insieme e facendo discutere studiosi italiani e stranieri secondo una prospettiva di ricerca multidisciplinare, attenta alle rappresentazioni visuali e verbali, alle immagini e ai testi degli eventi sonori riportati dai viaggiatori nei loro diari di viaggio in terre lontane e sconosciute.