Argumenta et Auctores

Beverly Jerold
Quantz and Agricola: A Literary Collaboration

According to the flautist Johann George Tromlitz (1791 and 1800), Johann Joachim Quantz's Versuch einer Anweisung, die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752) contained errors about the flute that could not have originated with Quantz. In 1800, Johann August Eberhard claimed it to be "reliably known" that Quantz relied on the pen of Johann Friedrich Agricola. Such a collaboration seems certain. Whereas the Berlin court composer Agricola had all the advantages of an upper-class education and published extensively, but usually anonymously, Quantz rose from humble circumstances to court positions. His autobiography omits any mention of book learning. Members of his class rarely had access to any but the most elementary education. The present article considers various factors pointing to Agricola as not only a collaborator in Quantz's book, but also the contributor of passages that were foreign to Quantz's experience, such as the detailed knowledge of German schools and universities, vocal practice, and Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard fingering.

Beverly Jerold's recent publications include The Complexities of Early Instrumentation: Winds and Brass (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), which treats the earliest instruction (late eighteenth century) about these instruments' limitations. Most composers wrote for them as they did for keyboard, producing parts that were deemed unplayable. Music Performance Issues 1600–1900 (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2016) reprints nineteen articles on subjects such as Beethoven's tempo marks, dotting, vocal performance, vibrato, and embellishment. A two-part article in Music Theory & Analysis (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014–15) concerns newly discovered material on temperament and intonation from the encyclopedist Denis Diderot. She is also a practicing keyboard musician.

Peter Mondelli
The Phonocentric Politics of the French Revolution

This article reexamines the songs of the French Revolution as a case study in the history of music as politics. Exploring the ways in which the act of singing in public eclipsed a more conventional semiotics of signs and signifiers, it offers a revised vision of how the matrix of sound, song, word, and meaning worked at the end of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it argues that late eighteenth century society was ideologically phonocentric: replete with both theoretical and practical examples of voices, sounds, and songs holding an assumed position of privilege in social and political life. In such a context, group singing was, de facto, a political act. During the French Revolution, specifically between 1789 and 1794, many opponents of the ancien régime capitalized on the privileged position of song in this phonocentric society, turning to music to unite disparate political factions in a common cause, albeit with varying degrees of success. Seeking the resonances of Rousseau's philosophy of voice in eighteenth-century musical discourse and practices, and reexamining Derrida's deconstructive reading of that philosophy, this article seeks to clarify the significance of the differences between the revolutionary era and our own.

Peter Mondelli has served as an assistant professor of music history at the University of North Texas since 2012. He is currently completing a book project, titled Opera, Print, and Capital in Nineteenth-Century Paris. He has presented his research at conferences in the US, UK, and Canada, and published in 19th-Century Music.

Seth Brodsky
Remembering, Repeating, Passacaglia: Weak Britten

In 2013, the year of his centennial, Benjamin Britten was doing just fine: festivals and performances world round, two excellent, press-powering biographies, conferences, and symposia. Amid these shoals in the boiling sea of Britten, however, one also found pockets of persistent grievance: that Britten was a mean, cold, manipulative, childish man; that he had a "tin ear" for politics; that he was, after all, a rather reactionary composer—impoverished, shallow, moderate, weak. In this article, I restage these complaints in the "Oedipal arena" of musical modernism, and reframe them through ideas of repetition and revision, specifically of an artist's precursors or, in psychoanalytic terms, his "chosen objects." I argue that many critiques of Britten's music rely on legislative presumptions about what constitutes an adequate revision of pre-existing music within an artist's habitus. Over and against these critiques, I argue that "moderate modernist" music such as Britten...