Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw ...
Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community. Specificity of visual imagery (e.g., identifiable protagonists, carefully rendered details, and inscriptions) combined with commemorative intent differentiates historical subjects from scenes conceived generically or drawn from daily life. In celebrating events meaningful to those holding power, historical subjects are propagandistic in that they foster a supremely favorable conception of those responsible for their creation. Yet no matter how carefully makers try to control the message, artworks can acquire an autonomy that permits audiences to construct “memories” of those events never intended.
Properly speaking, the Alexander Mosaic’s manufacture comprises Roman work, but most scholars believe it reflects a lost painting described by Pliny the Elder: “Philoxenos of Eretria painted a picture for King Cassander which must be considered second to none, which represented the battle of Alexander against Darius” (NH 35.110). This would date to ca. 330-310 BC, when memories of the battle were still fresh, and its propaganda value would be most effective. That painting may have been brought to Italy as plunder after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC. The fact that the mosaic reproduces an earlier work for a later audience forces us to consider the discrepancies between historical narrative and artistic tradition.
All of the surviving accounts of Alexander’s conquests were written against the background of Roman imperialism, and ancient readers necessarily interpreted what they read in the light of the social and political structures that characterized their age. Alexander “the Great” was a Roman creation: the title first appears in a Roman comedy by Plautus in the early second century BC. Because historical representations are distinctive and clearly recognizable to contemporary viewers, since its discovery in the House of the Faun at Pompeii in 1831, scholars have had to reckon with how the mosaic’s imagery functioned in two very different contexts: first as a fourth-century Greek painting and then as a first-century Roman mosaic. A painting celebrating a Macedonian victory meant something quite distinct when originally displayed in a Hellenistic palace than when it was possibly displayed as war booty in a Roman temple; and the mosaic copy in a Roman private house would carry still different significance. For a Roman audience, the commemorative specificity of the battle scene was probably less important than celebrating the qualities of Alexander’s personality that spoke to them: his ferocity in battle, his charisma, and his military genius. Alexander was as much a part of the cultural memory of Rome as Homeric epic was for Greece, providing a paradigm for their own military triumphs.
Heinrich Fuhrmann first suggested that the Roman patron of the artwork had participated in the Macedonian Wars, and that this mosaic copy of a spoil of war functioned as both a sign of his admiration for the “greatest” general and perpetuated the memory of his own role in overthrowing the dynasty that Alexander founded. A Roman viewer might have imagined a broader reenactment of the paradigmatic conflict between East and West, a conflict he may have participated in or merely appreciated through the lens of Roman ideology. Given the Roman taste for the allusive, a history become anachronistic could have also been appropriated and meaningfully reused through a cognitive metaphor whereby in place of Alexander’s empire, Roman viewers could have understood their own (since Rome had conquered the territories formerly occupied by Macedonia). Roman sources repeatedly compare Roman campaigns on the eastern frontier with earlier Greek struggles. Given that Parthia, which had fought on the Persian side against Alexander, was now Rome’s enemy in the east and Alexander’s legacy was now Roman, a Roman viewer could have easily identified with the Greeks. Furthermore, the patron who commissioned the mosaic copy belonged to the new Roman ruling class, which appropriated older Greek artworks—the fruits of their conquest—to express social status. It was prominently featured in a luxury dwelling, of a type also of Greek origin, whose colonnaded courtyards and receptions rooms were sumptuously decorated with other paintings and sculptures meant to impress visitors. Its Roman owner may even have appreciated the Alexander Mosaic as a “work of art”: an image divorced from its original context by its new role in a Roman social performance.
When artworks reconstruct a past in order to explain the present, their makers determine which events are remembered and rearrange them to conform to the required social narrative. Their display provides visible manifestations of collective memories. More than merely passive reflections, monuments with historical subjects reinforce those memories and confer them prestige. Divergent motivations were again in evidence after the Alexander Mosaic’s discovery when various European leaders such as the Prussian King Fredrick Wilhelm IV ordered copies of the copy: was the motivation for such modern commissions the desire for prestige achieved through association with a masterpiece from antiquity or with the political symbolism of its historical subject?
Featured image: Alexander Mosaic (ca. 100 BCE), Naples, Museo archeologico nazionale. Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons.
Music publishing is an exciting and fast-paced industry touching all our lives, whether as performers, composers, or music lovers listening in the car or in our favorite movies. Music publishers provide the conduit, the link, through which a composer’s or song-writer’s inspiration travels, allowing musicians and audiences to discover and explore different works. It’s a publisher’s job to disseminate as widely as possible the songs and the symphonies, the jingles and the jazz that we all so enjoy.
Embracing the technology
Publishing music has always been driven largely by both technological development and consumer behaviour, particularly in the multifarious ways through which music is delivered and consumed. Looking back, it is clear to me, for example, how publishers in the early twentieth century needed to respond (quickly!) to the mechanical reproduction of their music in then-new devices such as gramophones and pianolas. How were publishers and their composers to be paid for such use of their music? A new legal ‘right’ was the answer—the ‘mechanical reproduction right’—and from that rapidly followed infrastructures and processes to license and collect income from the soon-to-be ubiquitous availability and use of recorded and broadcast music. Oxford University Press, in the 1920s, was fast to embrace those new technologies commercially, issuing guides to ‘pianola repertoire’ and radio broadcasts, teaming with the BBC and Radio Times, and including gramophone records as components within some publications. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and we find ourselves still running that same race, keeping up with technological change and with the ever-hungry blanket consumption of music of all genres. There’s a near-constant need to find new solutions for delivering, monetizing, and protecting the music that we publish and into which so much inspiration, effort, and finance is invested.
My role as Head of the Business Operations team at OUP entails understanding and embracing new technology and maximizing opportunities, whether through licensing, new partnerships, or perhaps reviewing our back catalogue for materials that we can refresh and supply in different ways and formats, always ensuring that we have the required legal rights: copyright drives our work, but equally important are our agreements with composers, authors, and partners. Publishing music is a collaborative business.
Music today flourishes in a digital environment. Composers create their music ‘manuscripts’ as digital notation files and, from these, publishers work to produce printed scores, orchestral parts for hiring, and new files which can be distributed and sold (and even streamed) online. Sound recordings are now made, stored, delivered, and consumed in digital formats. The joys of ‘digital’ are many: its durability, flexibility, and accessibility are all key advantages for music publishers and for the communities which make music. A conventional printed choral music anthology, chunky and possibly heavy for singers to hold, provides comprehensive access to a wide range of content in a fixed and immutable form. But, because the ‘content’ used to create that anthology is digitally based, it is now possible to split this up and easily supply individual items from such anthologies, allowing choirs to choose repertoire from the larger collection, in formats suitable for those choirs’ (or even for the individual singers’) needs. We as publishers informally call this process ‘atomization’: breaking the bigger publication down into its smallest useful components.
‘Atomizing’ the collection
To give an example, in 2023 OUP issued the collection The Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers (compiled and edited by Marques L. A. Garrett) as one of a select group of special publications marking OUP’s centenary as a music publisher. This celebratory collection is ground-breaking in its new and diverse content, and it also looks forward in opening accessibility to that content: a handsome printed anthology, yes, and many choirs continue to purchase it in that format—but of its thirty-five separate items, twenty-seven have also been made available separately to purchase as digital sheet music downloads. And of those twenty-seven, twelve are additionally available as printed sheet music ‘leaflets’. Much of the content is available, too, to browse and peruse free of charge on the Yumpu platform, making choice and selection a simple matter. In parallel, all of this is backed up by equally accessible sound recordings of twenty-five of the anthology’s titles, available (again ‘digitally’) as streams through Spotify—these tracks can be used for repertoire selection, for learning, or simply for pure enjoyment.
The digital provenance of this anthology’s text and music notation files and of the audio recordings has clearly enabled the transformation of the Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers from a traditional ‘single anthology’ concept into a flexible, convenient, accessible, and multi-component resource. Choirs are now even able to customize their own ‘collections’ from the bigger collection! As did our OUP predecessors with their pianolas and their gramophones, so today’s publishers embrace the new and the emerging technologies, working with platforms and partners, to ensure the widest possible availability of the music which we publish. In the digital environment that presence and access is now only ever a few seconds away—from anywhere in the world.
Looking ahead
OUP Music’s centenary allowed us to reflect on the profound changes that truly impacted on the shape and the content of our catalogue—not only technological, but social, political, and attitudinal change, wars and conflicts, and (most recently) the immediate and wide-ranging effects of the Covid-19 pandemic (music publishing was first bowed by this, but then rose splendidly to the challenge of delivering and supporting music in new and creative ways).
But what of the future? The next one hundred years? All that is certain is that the ‘technology race’ will continue, as will societal and other developments, and that music publishers will have to (and surely will) keep up. Artificial Intelligence is merely the latest technology development, but it’s already challenging creator communities in terms of both content and its use, and the underlying copyright (as did those pianolas one hundred years ago, which essentially used ‘artificial intelligence’ to create live piano performances in real time, the same performances over and over again). The sophisticated digital supply routes with which we increasingly engage—and whatever may replace them in the future!—will mean that the old distinctions between ‘selling’ and ‘hiring’ and ‘licensing’ music will probably disappear or become blended. Solutions will be found and will be designed to continue delivering, in the best possible ways and to multitudes of users, the increasingly diverse and always exciting music created by our writers—across the globe, and possibly beyond.
Until recently, women were regularly dismissed as unable to compose music. In 1894, the French physician Havelock Ellis said, ‘There is certainly no art in which they have shown themselves more helpless’. In 1891, the music critic Eduard Hanslick stated that women were less capable than men of mental achievements. In 1940, the psychologist Carl Seashore blamed the lack of music composed by women on women’s urge to be loved and admired, rather than to achieve.
These men, and countless others like them, chose to ignore the many factors which inhibited women from composing, distributing, and hearing performances of their music. These factors included lack of education, the demands of marriage and children, societal pressures (Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762 that ‘a woman outside of the home displays herself indecently’), limited opportunities for performance, difficulties in getting published, and limited archiving.
Educating women to the same level as men was unusual until relatively recently. The few who were lucky enough to receive a full education included wealthy aristocrats from artistic families, like Duchess Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa (1724-80) and those who studied privately with ambitious parents, such as Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-96). By the late 19th century, women sought training and validation at institutions, but formal studies were complicated by various challenges: Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) and Betzy Holmberg (1860-1900) both left Leipzig Conservatoire early, finding its tuition unsatisfactory. At the Paris Conservatoire, Louise Farrenc (1804-75) found that composition classes were only for men. Oxford University blocked the Bachelor of Music degree earned by Elizabeth Stirling (1819-95) on learning she was female.
Marriage further impacted women’s composing. Fortunately, the husbands of Amy Marcy Beach (1867-1944) and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) allowed them to continue composing, though they forbade them from performing. Maria Agata Szymanowska (1789-1831) divorced her husband after he objected to her career. Betzy Holmberg stopped composing after her marriage.
Robert Schumann’s wife Clara (1819-96) continued composing until his death, but Robert believed his work took precedence over hers, saying that ‘Clara herself knows that her main occupation is as a mother’. Of course, Clara Schumann’s eight children, two miscarriages, her husband’s failing mental health and her career as a virtuoso pianist considerably inhibited her freedom to compose, but her famous statement: ‘a woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do it’ also points to another challenge which afflicted many (most?) women composers: the internalising of society’s doubts about their ability.
Women favoured small-scale works for ‘feminine’ instruments: the violin, piano, and harp, so the scarcity of music by women for organ—long considered a ‘male’ instrument—is hardly surprising. Perhaps women yearned for more sonority, colour, and volume, as many of those small-scale pieces transcribe easily; in fact, some are more effective on the organ than on the instruments for which they were written. For example, Louise Farrenc’s ‘Fugue on Two Subjects’ greatly benefits from the organ’s sustaining power and the structural clarity that imaginative registration on two or three manuals brings. Clara Schumann’s Op. 16, No.3 states ‘for piano’, but only by playing the bass notes on the organ pedals can the player cope with the wide stretches and sustain the long pedal-points adequately.
Those of us who care about making women’s voices heard must mourn the loss of so much music from the past; much was unpublished or discarded, and the authorship of published pieces was sometimes obscured by pseudonyms or gender-neutral names. Dozens of unpublished scores by Florence Price (1887-1953) were discovered by chance in 2009 in a dilapidated house. Augusta Holmés first published under a pseudonym; Betzy Holberg published her early works as the gender-neutral ‘B.Holmberg’, and ‘Clement de Bourges’ was only recently identified as Clementine de Bourges (c1530-61).
Women composers today thankfully face far fewer challenges in being published and heard. Yet, as Sara Mohr-Pietsch claimed in a recent article for the Guardian newspaper, 40% of living composers are female, and yet only about 17% of names on music publishers’ lists are female. The balance is slowly shifting in many publishers’ catalogues, as evidenced by new works such as The Oxford Book of Organ Music by Women Composers. However, this situation will only improve if we celebrate women’s music in every way available to us: by publishing, playing, recording, and teaching their music, as well as highlighting both their historic and ongoing contribution to music history, and joining bodies which promote them, such as The Society of Women Organists.
Feature image: Organ musical instrument by Eloy-CM. Getty Images via Canva.
Today, our college and university music students are facing a rapidly changing global marketplace. There are new technologies, career options, virtual education, and so forth. As educators, we continue to focus on the highest standards of pedagogy. However, we need to also expand our curricula to include the necessary preparatory training in skills that will transcend a dizzying rate of change. We are preparing our music students in some cases for jobs that may not yet exist! At the very least, our students are unlikely to simply inherit our careers. Rather, their careers are in their hands. And with entrepreneurship training they have the greatest advantage in developing thriving careers in today’s marketplace.
As we prepare our students for an entrepreneurial world, we must do so within the context of musical and intellectual rigor as well. Tradition and excellence meet innovation and imagination. The good news is that artists can indeed create thriving careers. If you need evidence, I direct you to two landmark research projects, both published in 2011. These groundbreaking studies came from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) out of Indiana University, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
The SNAAP study constitutes to date the largest dataset gathered about the lives and careers of arts graduates, including 13,851 alumni from 154 different arts programs. They found that arts grads were putting together diverse career options with strong indications of personal satisfaction, and that most of the thriving artists tended to be highly entrepreneurial with similar levels of employment as other college graduates. The NEA’s study, “Artist Employment Projections Through 2018,” found that the projected growth rate for artists by 2018 was at 11%, with the overall labor force growing by 10%. Clearly, the notion of the starving artist is far from accurate.
While it may seem daunting, there are several innovative strategies that can incorporate entrepreneurship training within an undergraduate music degree program, requiring few if any additional budgetary resources or additional faculty time. The applied-lesson studio is the ideal setting for this since it is already home to academic advising, senior capstone projects, internships, professional networking, audition preparation, and the crafting of applications for postgraduate employment or advanced study.
A model for developing effective entrepreneurial training can be found in what I call “curricular cells.” For over twenty years, I have used this idea effectively with college students. These self-contained curricular cells function as units of instruction, as opposed to having one course for “music entrepreneurship,” or even a bona fide degree in this area. They are: Entrepreneurial Advising, Experiential Learning, and Entrepreneurship Instruction. These cells are sewn into the fiber of the applied-lesson studio. Depending upon the individual needs of the student, they can be swiftly adapted and developed to suit any emerging music entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurial Advising can begin at the end of the sophomore year. By then, students are usually ready to consider a deeper exploration regarding career preparation and to consider more profound questions such as: What is my personal vision as a musician? Why am I drawn to study music? What are my nascent career goals? What is needed to realize those dreams? At this juncture, one of my standard questions to my students is, “What would your perfect life look like ten years from now?” This prompts a host of responses that go far beyond what’s received in response to the more frequently asked question, “What will you major in at the university?”
At the heart of all thriving entrepreneurs is the understanding that first one must have a vision of what they wish to accomplish. This is followed by a concrete plan to achieve that vision. Successful teachers know this and can impart that wisdom to their students. Moreover, the music industry contains a diverse array of professional paths.
The second curricular cell I utilize is Experiential Learning. Students need hands-on marketplace experiences before they leave the protective cloister of our studios. I require my students to consider their senior capstone project as early as their sophomore year. By the junior year, students design their project and create a doable plan with the necessary timelines, all within the degree requirements of the major they have chosen. These professional projects may encompass performance, internship/thesis, job shadowing, a foray into music publishing, recording, journalism, financial development and fundraising, artist management, music technology, arts administration, and so forth. Through these professional projects, students also benefit from networking in an area they wish to explore, perhaps leading to a job. Furthermore, they acquire real world experience.
The third curricular cell that I include is that of Entrepreneurship Instruction. What this cell looks like can vary, as it requires using the resources at hand. For example, a weekly studio performance seminar is a great place to expose our students to new ideas. At least once a semester, I invite an industry professional to lecture on a topic of their choosing. I often organize exchanges with my colleagues. With professional bartering, numerous resources are available. A colleague in the music industry might be a great resource for students to hear about the vast array of jobs in our profession. On campus visiting artists are also an excellent resource, and they usually enjoy sharing career advice with students.
What can you add? Maybe a weekend retreat for exploring the idea of a professional vision. Create collaborative projects between students: a model for building an arts consortium. Discover volunteer opportunities for your students. Source an internship suited to your student that directly corresponds to their career aspirations. There is much more to say about this topic. Fundamentally, however, we want to teach our students that their careers are in their hands, that they must work creatively to develop opportunities, acquire the necessary skills for their careers, and be flexible, engaging in lifelong learning. In nurturing entrepreneurial skills alongside students’ artistic journeys, we empower them to find fulfilling careers—and lives.
I’ve heard the phrase “It’s the instrument most like the human voice and that’s why it’s so expressive” countless times over the years. As a cellist myself I’m probably biased to some degree, but I truly believe that the cello has a unique voice which wonderfully synergises with the human voice.
In addition to being a cellist, I’m also a composer of mainly choral music, so I was thrilled when Oxford University Press invited me to edit a book of pieces specifically for choir and cello, particularly as such an anthology has never been published before. How interesting and rewarding to bring together a collection of pieces where the cello is seen in all its varied guises!
The cello is hugely versatile: it is able to mingle with or stand out above or below the voices of the choir; it can provide a jazz walking bass or a baroque continuo; it can function as a soloist with the voices of the choir accompanying; it is able to produce a variety of textures and rhythmic drives with pizzicato strummed chords or arpeggiated figures; it can provide a solid bass beneath complex rhythms or harmonies in the choir. What other instrument could switch between any of these roles in a moment?
Its ambit encompasses the whole vocal range, from bass to soprano, and its timbre is very similar to the human voice. Its sound can be earthy, gritty, soulful, or joyful; able to convey the deepest emotion, just like the human voice. Cellist Steven Isserlis said of the instrument “Even physically, one’s relationship to it is somehow similar to a singer with his or her voice; the cello seems to become part of one’s body, as one hugs it close and coaxes mellow sounds from it”.
It is surprising that over the centuries comparatively little has been written for cello and solo voice—and even less for cello and choir. However, in recent years, music for cello and choir has become increasingly popular as composers (or commissioners?) seem to have discovered the wonderful possibilities of this combination.
Music for Choir and Cello includes not only new compositions but also adaptions of pieces from the classical canon, two of which I had the joy of arranging. “Agnus Dei II” from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis has long been a favourite of mine, and it was easy to reimagine this exquisite piece in a new setting for choir and cello.
Unlike the rest of the mass, which is for four voice parts, this final movement has an additional superius part which is in canon with the cantus, and thus seemed to lend itself perfectly to rescoring with the cello taking the superius (or second soprano) part. I experimented with bringing the cello down an octave for certain phrases in order to exploit the richer tones of the lower strings (and to give the cellist a break from playing high up on the A string for an entire piece!), but in the end decided to keep it at the original pitch throughout as this really draws the listener’s attention to the imitation between the upper two parts.
Whilst exploring other possible repertoire to arrange for the anthology, I came upon J.S.Bach’s uplifting and energetic motet Lobet den Herrn which struck me as an ideal contrast to the pure serenity of Palestrina’s music. Here, the cello functions in an entirely different way, playing a continuo part which often doubles the bass vocal line, and occasionally the tenor, and provides harmonic direction and rhythmic momentum beneath the largely contrapuntal voice parts.
I would love to think that the inclusion of these arrangements in Music for Choir and Cello might bring a couple of gems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the attention of those who perhaps haven’t sung such music before. (After all, it’s not every choir that has Palestrina in its repertoire!) And of course, I hope very much that all the pieces in this book will be enjoyed by singers, cellists, and audiences alike.
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