Musical historicism

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Musical historicism signifies the use of historical materials, structures, styles, techniques, media, conceptual content, etc., whether by a single composer or those associated with a particular school, movement, or period. Musical historicism is evident to a greater or lesser degree in the music of all periods beginning with the Middle Ages and continuing through the present.

Musical historicism also denotes a theory, doctrine, or aesthetic that emphasizes the importance of music history or in which history is seen as a standard of value or determining factor (as in performance practice).

Contents

[edit] The Meaning of "Musical Historicism"

The term "historicism" has acquired various, sometimes confusing meanings over a wide range of disciplines. The British philosopher Karl Popper, who disliked modern music and strongly preferred the works of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, spoke of "the failure of the historicist propaganda for the modern in music." He opposed the socioscientific doctrine of historicism that discoverable laws of historical change make it possible to predict future developments. Repudiating the claim that Schoenberg was "an inevitable historical force," Popper dismissed the idea of producing art work "ahead of its time" (Gopnik 2002).

When referring to the arts, however, the term "historicism" generally denotes something distinctly different from the historicism targeted by Popper's critique. It designates "a style (as in architecture) characterized by the use of traditional forms and elements." (Merriam-Webster 2003). Historicism stands in contrast to modernism, "a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression" (Merriam-Webster 2003). However, it should be noted that "historicism," thus defined, does not necessarily exclude such recently established traditions as atonality, whose earliest use can be dated to 1908 (the finale of Schoenberg's second string quartet).[citation needed] Nor does it exclude the possibility of strong historical influences in modernist works of art.

The study of musical historicism poses numerous difficulties, not the least of which is the almost total loss of music created prior to the Middle Ages. Although abundant physical evidence demonstrates the persistence of the Classical orders in architecture from their inception in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries BCE through the present, far too few specimens of Greek and Roman musical composition remain to allow for even a moderately comprehensive understanding of the origins and development of music in the Classical world. Whereas historicist practices in architecture and other creative disciplines can be traced to antiquity, the loss of virtually all of their Classical patrimony, whether by accident, neglect, or design, has left composers with far fewer traditional resources from which to draw for creative inspiration.[citation needed]

Another difficulty stems from the fact that distinguishing between the old and the new in music is not as straightforward a process as it might seem. The modernist music of Schoenberg, for example, draws abundantly on traditional elements and techniques, including the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, consonance and dissonance, variation, inversion, and retrograde, as well as traditional forms such as the concerto, suite, string quartet, string trio, symphony, and wind quintet, and sometimes is dependent on historical conceptual content (e.g., the biblical traditions undergirding Moses und Aron).[citation needed] Whereas the historicism of the Ancient Dances and Airs for Lute (1917–31) by Ottorino Respighi is readily apparent to the ear, since the composer drew directly on the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century composers, the historicism informing the Music of Changes (1951) by John Cage, based on the ancient Chinese I Ching, is deeply embedded in the compositional process (Tomkins, 111–12).

The study of history and historical influence also raises fundamental questions about the nature of time. Many physicists, including Einstein, have maintained that the familiar division of time into past, present, and future is an illusion, from which it necessarily follows that "old" and "new" are terms as relative as "up" and "down" (Davies 2006, 9). Since concepts of time and history and the average lifespans of human beings living in different periods and cultures are variable, these, too, are factors that must also be considered.

These problems notwithstanding, even a superficial look at history reveals that historicism played a significant role in the creation of new music long before the stimulus afforded by the rise of musicology and the widespread publication and dissemination of modern editions and recordings of earlier music.[citation needed]

[edit] The History of Musical Historicism

[edit] The Middle Ages

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The historicist practice of including traditional melodies or fragments thereof in new compositions had become particularly widespread by the late medieval period. In the first complete polyphonic setting of the Mass by a single composer, the Messe de Nostre Dame (before 1365) by Guillaume de Machaut, the "Gloria in excelcis Deo" and "Credo in unum Deum" are still sung in plainsong. The Kyrie freely follows the structure of the liturgical melody it borrows in the tenor voice part. The Sanctus and Agnus Dei are also based on earlier chants. In the Credo, a plainsong melody is paraphrased in the motetus voice.

After Machaut's death in 1377, his life and music were commemorated in Armes, amours—O flour des flours, a déploration in the form of a four-part double ballade with text by Eustache Deschamps and music by François Andrieu. The earliest known in a series of such musical memorials that allude to the styles of deceased composers, at the words "La mort Machaut" Andrieu deliberately imitates the sustained chordal style heard in the Gloria and Credo of Machaut's earlier Messe de Nostre Dame. This practice of alluding to the style of a deceased composer would establish a tradition that has continued for centuries (cf. Mort tu as navré by Johannes Ockeghem, composed in memory of Gilles Binchois; Nymphes des bois by Josquin Desprez, composed in memory of Ockeghem; the two apothéoses in memory of Lully and Corelli composed by François Couperin; and Le Tombeau de Couperin composed by Maurice Ravel).

The legacy of medieval historicism has been considerable. For example, works incorporating a particular plainsong continued to be composed hundreds of years after the borrowed chant itself first appeared. Among the best known examples of this kind are compositions in which the familiar "Dies irae" sequence, taken from the Latin Requiem Mass, figures prominently. Written in the late Middle Ages and attributed to Thomas of Celano (d. 1256), this chant was set polyphonically by Antoine Brumel in the mid sixteenth century, but is best known to audiences today as a prominent inclusion in numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century scores, among them the finale of the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz, the Totentanz and Dante Symphony of Franz Liszt, the Danse macabre of Camille Saint Saens, and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

The practice of hymn-singing in the vernacular would set in motion an historical tradition that would resonate with composers for centuries to come. Among the first nations to embrace devotional singing of this kind was Germany, where Latin sequences were sung in German from around the beginning of the fourteenth century. The German Protestant hymn or chorale, in whose long development the names of Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach (see below) loom large, was a direct outgrowth of medieval German hymnody.

Strongly influenced by the charismatic example of St. Francis of Assisi, a type of vernacular hymn known as the laude emerged in the thirteenth century that set in motion a musico-historical tradition that would endure into the nineteenth century. Various Companie de Laudesi were eventually established to encourage devotional singing in Italian among everyday people, and the musical and theatrical performances that took place in their halls would give rise by the late sixteenth century (along with the liturgical drama and mystery play) to the oratorio.

The quodlibet, which traces its origins to the medieval practice of placing various preexisting textual or melodic materials in different voice parts, would also reverberate through the centuries. In late medieval examples, the borrowed materials thus juxtaposed could be both sacred (plainsong) and/or secular (e.g., trouvère tunes or folksong), sometimes producing incongruously humorous effects. This technique would engage the interest of German composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and culminated in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the last (no. 30) of whose Goldberg Variations quotes two popular early eighteenth-century melodies. (See also centonization.) A twentieth-century example of this medieval technique is heard in the Cantate de Noël of Arthur Honegger, written for the Selzacher Passionsspiel, in a section of which four different carols are heard simultaneously.

Canon as a compositional technique has been embraced by composers of both vocal and instrumental music since the thirteenth century. (Canonic imitation) is evident in both the medieval motet and caccia mass, but today the best-known example of medieval canon is undoubtedly Sumer is icumen in, a rota which itself has influenced numerous composers in subsequent periods, among them Johannes Brahms, who imitated its structure in his own Canon, op. 113, no. 13, and a group of British composers (Oliver Knussen, Robert Saxton, Robin Holloway, Judith Weir, Alexander Goehr, Colin Matthews, David Bedford) who collaboratively composed a large set of Variations on "Sumer is icumen" in 1987. Closely related canonic types are the French chace and the Italian caccia, the latter being one of the earliest examples in a long history of musical works evoking the hunt.

Another important unifying device that emerged in the thirteenth century was the ostinato, a particular musical phrase that is "obstinately" repeated in succession. The tenor or pes in Sumer is icumen in is an ostinato, and many later examples can be found in sixteenth-century dance music and the ostinato motet. More recent usages of ostinato occur in the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor of Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 582); the Berceuse, op. 57 of Frédéric François Chopin; and the fourth movement of the Konzert, op. 38, of Paul Hindemith.

[edit] The Renaissance and Early Baroque

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Historians refer to the transitional period between the Middle Ages and early modern world as the Renaissance. The term "Renaissance," which entered the English language before the second half of the nineteenth century, is taken directly from the French word meaning "rebirth," since, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, these two centuries represented "the great revival of art and letters, under the influence of classical models, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and continued during the fifteenth and sixteenth." In this light, the Renaissance as a whole was a period in which historicism was the dominant mode of artistic creativity.

Some forms of historicist practice met with little immediate success. Nicola Vicentino, author of L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice, 1555), set about to revive the lost chromatic and enharmonic genera of Greek music theory through the invention of the arcicembalo and the arciorgano—keyboards furnished with six manuals whose octaves were subdivided into thirty-one keys, thus allowing for the performance of music composed in half-steps and microtones. (Microtonal composition, however, has been revived by numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers, including Charles Ives, Alois Hába, Harry Partch, and Krzystof Penderecki.)

Renaissance historicism was a primary catalyst for the revolutionary stylistic changes that led, among other things, to the creation of opera. In their attempts to emulate the mythical powers of ancient music, Jacopo Peri and his sixteenth-century contemporaries, with little more to stimulate their imaginations than extant literary works and treatises, pictorial representations, and other indirect evidence, sought to imitate through appropriate musical means the ideas and emotions suggested by newly composed dramatic poetry based on Classical models. Peri's now fragmentary Dafne is widely regarded as the first true opera.[citation needed]

Considerable controversy had arisen about the best way to realize Classical musical ideals. Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei, antiquarian theorists affiliated, like Peri, with the Florentine Camerata, contended that the ancient Greeks obtained their marvelous musical effects through melody alone, and were prepared to abandon polyphony entirely in the belief that its "diverse and contrary parts" would obscure the meaning and efficacy of the texts chosen to be set.[citation needed] Although he never took such a radical course in his own music, Claudio Monteverdi, on the authority of Plato's Republic, still believed that words should be "the mistress of the harmony and not the servant." Like his earlier and later contemporaries, the subject matter of his three surviving operatic masterpieces—L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and L'Incoronazione di Poppea—is drawn from Classical mythology and history.

The literary Italian madrigal of the fourteenth century freely served as a model for Renaissance authors, whose creative efforts, in turn, would inspire their composer contemporaries, including Jacob Arcadelt, Philippe Verdelot, and Adrian Willaert.[citation needed] The sixteenth-century revival of the madrigal, first in Italy and later in England, owed little or nothing to Trecento musical styles. Frequently provided with an amatory text and written in five or six imitative voice parts, by the early seventeenth century the madrigal had developed into an extremely sophisticated type, particularly in the hands of Carlo Gesualdo, Claudio Monteverdi, William Byrd and Thomas Morley. Monteverdi's late madrigals increasingly take on the character of monody, a style resulting from deliberate attempts by the Florentine Camerata to rediscover the music of the ancient Greeks. Although the madrigal subsequently fell out of fashion, it was revived by Arthur Sullivan, Edward German, and, in a modern orchestral context, by Bernard Rands.[citation needed]

At the beginning of the seventeenth century composers were still using traditional bass and harmonic patterns and dance types originating as early as the late fifteenth century as the basis of new music. The romanesca, which inspired numerous dance variations and vocal improvisations, attracted composers as late as Claudio Monteverdi, and Salomone Rossi. The harmonic pattern of the folia, a dance probably of fifteenth-century Portuguese origin, continued to hold the interest of composers not only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among them Marin Marais, Archangelo Corelli, and Johann Sebastian Bach, but in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries as well, including Franz Liszt, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Carl Nielsen, and David Solomons. Other renaissance variation and dance types that continued to be used by post-renaissance composers include the canzona and canzonet (e.g., those in the Années de pèlerinage of Franz Liszt); chaconne or passacaglia (e.g., the finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony and act 4, scene 5 of the opera Wozzek by Alban Berg; pavane (Pavane pour une infante défunte by Maurice Ravel); and moresca or Morris dance.

An important sixteenth-century ancestor (along with the canzona) of the fugue, the ricercare occupied an important place in the keyboard works of Girolamo Cavazzoni, Claudio Merulo, and Antonio Frescobaldi. It would reach its zenith in J. S. Bach's Musikalisches Opfer (Musical Offering (1747), and would be revived in the twentieth century by Bohuslav Martinů, Antonio Casella, and Igor Stravinsky (Cantata, 1951–52, based on a medieval text).

The intimate relationship between music and dance that existed in Greek drama was remembered and renewed during the Renaissance and early Baroque with the development of the ballet. Although little had survived of the music of Classical drama, courtly festivities featuring music, dance, costume, and stagecraft grew increasingly elaborate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by the seventeenth century the French court, under the patronage of the "Sun King" Louis XIV, ushered in the first great age of ballet (see also Ballet Comique de la Reine, ballet de cour, balletto a cavallo, boutade, carrousel, danse equestre, intermezzo, mascarade, trionfo). Jean-Baptiste Lully created music for a variety of new courtly dance types that would become highly stylized and find their way into the suite, sonata, and symphony of later centuries (e.g., the minuet). Lully also introduced the ballet into French opera, in which subject matter drawn from ancient myth, legend, and history was predominant (see also opéra ballet). In England, the masque fulfilled a similar courtly function. Composers such as Henry Purcell (Dido and Aeneas), Christoph Willibald Gluck (Orphée et Euridice), and Ludwig van Beethoven (Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus) variously sustained this classically inspired tradition, which has endured into modern times in such works as Job—"a masque for dancing" by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Bacchus et Ariane by Albert Roussel, Apollon musagète by Igor Stravinsky, and Harmonie der Welt by Paul Hindemith. (Many modern ballets have also been based on preexisting scores inspired by Classical themes, e.g., the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune of Claude Debussy was transformed into a one-act ballet by Sergei Diaghilev.)

In the field of sacred music, the Mass continued to provide a variety of opportunities for composers to create new works while respecting ties to centuries-old musical traditions. The items of the Gregorian plainsong mass could be set polyphonically and performed in accordance with established liturgical cycles. All the movements of a cantus firmus mass could be based on a single Gregorian melody (or even a preexisting secular tune), which was usually heard in the tenor. In some masses, the borrowed melody was distributed among the various voice parts, freely varied, or paraphrased with great imaginative skill, as in the Missa Pange lingua (c. 1520) of Josquin Desprez, based on a thirteenth-century hymn attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. Tenor melodies could also be "carved out" of the vowels of a name or short text using the solmization syllables derived from the eleventh-century Guidonian hexachord, or the hexachord itself might serve in the same capacity, as in the Missa Ut re mi fa sol la of Palestrina. Relatively few masses used a newly invented cantus firmus, whereas one of the most frequent types, the parody mass, was composed of various parts and sections from preexisting polyphonic works.

[edit] The Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries

In subsequent centuries, the historicist practice of borrowing clearly identifiable preexisting musical materials retained its importance. Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries incorporated traditional chorale melodies into numerous of their major works in such genres as the cantata, chorale prelude, chorale fantasia, chorale fugue, chorale motet, chorale variations, oratorio, and Passion. Like composers before them, Johannes Brahms and Max Reger composed variations on themes taken from earlier composers (e.g., Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Handel, op. 24, and Variations on a Theme by Haydn, op. 56a; and Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach, op. 81, and Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, op. 132). Stravinsky derived much of the musical material for his Pulcinella from the work of various eighteenth composers.

Creating new music that closely follows the style of an earlier composer or period has provided a creative outlet for both major and minor masters. Mozart, whose music was richly informed by his contact with the antiquarian music circle of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, exhibited a particular gift for the baroque style in such works as his Suite in C Major (sometimes subtitled "in the style of Handel"), KV 399 (385i), which includes an ouverture, allemande, and courante. (A fragmentary sarabande and Eine kleine Gigue, K. 574 also document his skill as an historicist composer.) In a letter to his father of 7 February 1778, he proudly states, "As you know, I can more or less adopt or imitate any kind and any style of composition." (Solomon, 119.)

A more eclectic approach to historicism in which multiple historical style influences are evident was adopted by Ludwig Spohr in his Symphony No. 6 in G Major, Op. 116 ("Historical") "in the Style and Taste of Four Different Periods": 1. Bach-Handel'sche Periode, 1720, Largo - Grave; 2. Haydn-Mozart'sche Periode, 1780, Larghetto; 3. Beethoven'sche Periode, 1810, Scherzo; and 4. Allerneueste Periode ["very latest Period"], 1840, Allegro vivace. Though not characteristic of his later style, Sergei Prokofiev paid tribute not only to the "classicism" of Haydn but also to the baroque gavotte in his Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 25 ("Classical").

The fusion of historical and emergent styles, forms, techniques, and content in a given work is encountered with great frequency in the music of most periods. The fugue, for example, whose origins can be traced to the imitative counterpoint of the late Middle Ages and which reached full maturity in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, figures prominently in the musical styles of a number of important composers in the nineteenth century and beyond, including Beethoven, Mendelssohn (whose early works were modelled on symphonies of C. P. E. Bach), Reger (whose works for solo cello, viola or violin closely imitate Bachian forms), Shostakovich, and Hindemith.

A closely related instrumental genre that first appeared in the late Renaissance, the toccata achieved particular prominence in the keyboard works of Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach and has since been revived by such distinguished composers as Robert Schumann, Claude Debussy, and Sergei Prokofiev.

Other romantic and early twentieth-century composers among the many who demonstrated either explicit or implicit historicist affinities are Samuel Barber, Béla Bartók, Benjamin Britten, Marius Casadesus, Carlos Chávez, Ferdinand David, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, François-Joseph Fétis, Edward Grieg, Vincent d'Indy, Charles Ives, Fritz Kreisler, Ignaz Paderewski, Hans Pfitzner, Manuel Ponce, Francis Poulenc, Ottorino Respighi, Erik Satie, Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Richard Wagner.

In the 20th century Carl Orff attempted a revival of ancient Greek practices of musical theater (he also regularly contributed his own texts in Latin and Ancient Greek to his own musical works).

[edit] Historicism in Contemporary Music

Paralleling the work of contemporary architects, designers, authors, and other artists who have openly revisited the past, a growing number of twenty-first-century composers have adopted the historicist approach to composition, employing to a greater or lesser extent materials, structures, styles, techniques, media, and conceptual content associated with previous eras. In contemporary art music, the entire gamut of historical style periods has served as a creative resource. The musical styles of the renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, and early modern periods have been variously revisited by Joseph Dillon Ford, while other composers and composer-performers have focussed more specifically on ancient or "early music" traditions, including Benjamin Bagby (Beowulf and Edda), Gavin Bryars ("Vita Nova" and "Oi me lasso" cycle), René Clemencic (Missa mundi and the Molière film suite), and Jordi Savall (Tous les matins du monde and "Catalunya Midlenaria").[citation needed]

Some composers produce original works that evoke historical periods, such as Easley Blackwood, whose Cello Sonata (1985) was intended to suggest the style Schubert would have discovered had he lived until 1845,[citation needed] and Amaral Vieira, whose Te Deum in stilo barocco, op. 213 (1986), draws upon both medieval liturgical materials and large-scale choral resources recalling the music of Handel and his contemporaries.[citation needed] Others have quoted or paraphrased actual historical materials, as Alfred Schnittke in Moz-art à la Haydn (1976–77), Bernard Rands in Madrigali (after Monteverdi/Berio, 1977), Jean Chatillon in Le chant de Seikilos (before 1977), and Jeffery Cotton in La Folia (2000).[citation needed] An eclectic synthesis of traditional and contemporary elements is evident in the Three Pieces in Olden Style (1963) of Henryk Górecki, the Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio (1983) of Claude Bolling, and the Suite in the Old Style (1987) of Alfred Schnittke.[citation needed]

Given that tonality itself is deeply rooted in pre-modernist historical traditions, tonal types of minimalism, post-minimalism, and contemporary world music may all be subsumed in varying degrees under the rubric of historicism.

Other living or recently deceased composers whose music has been informed by historical musical and/or conceptual elements include the following: John Adams, Luciano Berio, John Cage, John Corigliano, Lukas Foss, Philip Glass, Sofia Gubaidulina, Lou Harrison, Christos Hatzis, Hans Werner Henze, Alan Hovhaness, Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, George Rochberg, and John Tavener.[citation needed]

Interest in musical historicism has been spurred by the emergence of such international organizations as the Delian Society, dedicated to the revitalization of tonal art music, and Vox Saeculorum, whose composer members have a specialized interest in baroque idioms(Colburn 2007). Historicism has also been stimulated by the early music revival: the works of Alexandre Danilevsky, Eduard Drach, Paulo Galvão, and Roman Turovsky-Savchuk have been strongly influenced by these composer-performers' familiarity with historical performance practices pertaining to the lute and early guitar.[citation needed]

Some contemporary historicist composers, similar to the eighteenth-century literary figures Thomas Chatterton, James MacPherson (the Ossian poems), and Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), have written under a pseudepigraphic ascription, attributing their work to other composers, either real or imaginary. These include Winfried Michel, author of the impressive "Haydn Forgeries," (Beckerman 1994; Lindskoog 1996) and Roman Turovsky-Savchuk, whose original lute and viola da gamba compositions in the baroque style were sufficiently convincing to be mistaken for works by masters of the composer's own mythopoeic invention ([1]) and led to accusations of "trivializing musicology" (Smith 2002).

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ [http://polyhymnion.org/swv/intervista.html "Roman Turovsky interviewed by Grant Colburn"

[edit] References

[edit] Further Reading

  • Applegate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. Cornell University Press.
  • Burkholder, J. Peter, Andreas Giger, and David C. Birchler (eds.). 1994–2007. Musical Borrowing: An Annotated Bibliography. Bloomington: Indiana School of Music.
  • Carl, Robert. 2001. "Introduction: Historicism in American Music since 1980." Contemporary Music Review 20, no. 4:1-7.
  • Colburn, Grant. 2007. "A New Baroque Revival." Early Music America 13, no. 2 (Summer): 36-45, 54-55. Online version of Turovsky interview, portions of which were used in this article.
  • Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1965. "Quotation and Originality." The Portable Emerson, ed. and with an introduction by Mark Van Doren. New York: The Viking Press.
  • Ford, Joseph Dillon. 2003. Orpheus in the Twenty-first Century: Historicism and the Art Music Renascence. Gainesville, Florida: New Music Classics [online publisher].
  • Frisch, Walter. 2004. "Reger's Historicist Modernism." The Musical Quarterly 87(4): 732-48.
  • Gardiner, Patrick L. 1995. "Historicism." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Garratt, James. 2002. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • ———. 2004. "Mendelssohn and the Rise of Musical Historicism." The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. Peter Mercer-Taylor, 55–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Gopnik, Adam. 2002. "The Porcupine: A Pilgrimage to Popper." The New Yorker. 1 April. 7 January 2007.
  • Grout, Donald J. and Claude V. Palisca. 1996. A History of Western Music, 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
  • "Historicism." 2003. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 11th ed.
  • "Lament." 1975. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2d ed., rev. and enlarged.
  • Lenz, Eric David. 2002. "Neoclassicism in Claude Debussy's Sonate pour violoncelle et piano." DMA diss., University of Alabama.
  • Lippman, Edward. 1994. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
  • MacKenzie, James C. 1995. The Text of Time: Musical Quotation and Historicism in Berio's Sinfonia. Ottawa: National Library of Canada (Bibliothèque nationale du Canada).
  • Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen. 2004. The Foundations of Contemporary Composition. Hofheim: Wolke.
  • "Mass." Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2d ed., rev. and enlarged, 1975.
  • Mercer-Taylor, Peter. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Mihailovic, Alexander. 1999. Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries : A Centennial Symposium. Westport, Connectivut: Greenwood Press.
  • Reese, Gustave. 1968. Music in the Middle Ages. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
  • ———. 1959. Music in the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
  • Roth, Michael S. 1994. Rediscovering History : Culture, Politics, and the Psyche. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
  • Saffle, Michael and Rossana Dalmonte. 2003. Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe: Music as a Mirror of Religious, Political, Cultural, and Aesthetic Transformations. Proceedings of the International Conference held at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio (Como), 14–18 December 1998. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press.
  • Toews, John Edward. 2004. Becoming Historical : Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-century Berlin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, expanded ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
  • Trachtenberg, Marvin, and Isabelle Hyman. 1986. Architecture from Prehistory to Post-Modernism: The Western Tradition. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
  • Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  • Weaver, Robert Lamar; Norma Wright Weaver; Susan Helen Parisi; Ernest Charles Harriss; and Calvin M Bower. 2000. Music in the Theater, Church, and Villa : Essays in Honor of Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver. Warren, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press.
  • Wolff, Christoph. 2004. "A Bach Cult in Late-Eighteenth-Century Berlin: Sara Levy’s Musical Salon." 1886th Stated Meeting. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 15 December.
  • Zon, Bennett. 1999. Nineteenth-century British Music Studies. Aldershot [Hampshire]; Brookfield [Vermont]: Ashgate.