Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
My to-review-queue is a bit clogged up so I’m doing more mini-reviews.
I HEART HEARTZ. Dr. Heartz is definitely one of the more productive musicologists of the 20th century, and this book is number two in a sort of trilogy of music history he’s been writing now that he’s at the end of his career. And it’s amazing.
This is the sort of book one can only write at the end of a long and fruitful academic career. It takes a lifetime to build up the level of advanced knowledge required to process all the disparate elements of music presented in this book into a coherent argument for some sort of overall invisible musical zeitgeist all the composers and musicians seemed to be working under. An absolute pleasure to read but also rather humbling because man, what am I doing with my life. I am not on track to write anything like this when I am retired. My main form of literary output is reddit comments. Fuuuuuuuuuuu
There’s some minor proofing/editing issues in this book. He has a bad habit of referring to people casually by last name several pages before he introduces them (probably moved some stuff around in editing) so you’re like “wait, what, who?” but if you have a good working background knowledge of music history in this period you should be okay.
Good god damn it I wanted to like this book SO MUCH MORE than I did. The author attempts to do a economic analysis of of the profitability of composing various forms of music for Western composers. Cool right? For his data on the lives of composers he works off of Grove (probably an okay choice for that data) but for their body of work he gets his data from … a guide to modern recordings of the music. NOOOO why would you do that?? This means a) work that has been lost will not be included and b) work that has not been recorded for various reasons will not be included. He also defended this approach with some stunning reasoning:
To estimate the relative creative output or "productivity" of sample members, the length in centimeters of the recorded music listings in the Schwann Opus catalogue was measured. This variable is analogous to the citations indexes widely used to measure the productivity of scholars and the value of invention patents. The more music of enduring quality a composer wrote, the more items were likely to survive in recorded form, and hence the longer the Schwann listing. The better any given work was, the more likely it was to be recorded by multiple artists and groups, and so again, the longer the Schwann listing.
Just…what. An index of recorded music for historical pieces is in no way comparable to a citation impact ranking. One is made by the person’s own society, one is made 100+ years after by a different society. And I won’t even poke that “enduring quality” judgement with a 20 foot pole.
He gets an E FOR EFFORT because there’s lots of notes about MATH with FORMULAS in the back of the book, but the data and methodology is so flawed you just can’t trust anything in his analysis. He also has stuffed enough bar charts into this book to make you start wondering if you’re actually reading a middle-management Powerpoint. The chapter on music publishing profitability uses a different set of data however, a set of detailed financial data from a 1800s German publishing house, and I think that part is actually quite strong. The rest of the book is some sort of Whig-history-of-music-through-graphs, including a particularly irritating historical overview chapter with the framework of musical “feudalism” vs. “the free market.”
(It was also fun to read this close up after I read the Heartz book, because they both are essentially attempting to answer the same question.)
I got this for some research into early castrati, but ended up reading a lot more of it than I thought I would, because it’s a really nice book. It analyses the transfer of ideas from working Catholic musicians into Lutheran court worship in 17th century Dresden. Also has some nice bits about the social conditions these musicians would have been working under as Catholics in a Lutheran country, where their religion was essentially illegal.
However, the author somehow left out the marriage of castrato Bartolomeo Sorlisi to a local Lutheran girl in 1672, with his king-patron’s blessing and some Lutheran theological waffling about how it was okay because reasons. She already wrote a nice paper about this, so how do you leave that out of the book? That’s some good stuff!! Ah well. If you want to read about German Lutherans and Italian Catholics making some church music together and being pretty awkward, check this book out.
Highly disappointing. Before having read this book I might have thought calling a book “deeply shallow” was silly, but that’s the only way to describe this book. The author has a lot to say about celibacy, and yet, she also has nothing to say about celibacy. This book has no thesis, it is about 400 odd pages of anecdotes and generalities about celibacy in different times and places, heavy emphasis on the Christian varieties, but just observation without argument. The most the author is willing to commit herself to about celibacy is that it exists. She alternates between clearly holding her nose while writing about some instances of celibacy, and treating the rest with a salacious Cracked.com “History’s 10 Weirdest Asexuals” angle. Also, it’s less cited than Cracked.com. The endnotes are is a mess.
The eunuch/castrato section is so unbelievably botched I can’t take her on good faith for any of the other historical areas. The non-Christian examples I am particularly concerned with, because I don’t feel she has done the depth of research required to have a fair cultural understanding, other than her own culture perhaps, but that I’m even leery about.
As a bonus: while claiming the forward and the endword to be completely neutral on celibacy, in the end chapter she did not bother to disguise her contempt for celibacy decisions made at Vatican II.
And I shall now, for a finale, quote my what is possibly my favorite Goodreads review of all time:
this pop read sucks my dick and just offers some dumb funfacts about celibacy, no deeper analysis.
Any advices for someone looking for English books on the history of Sweden around the XVI - early XVIII century? Books on the subject seem to be harder than I expected to come by and I appreciate all the help I can get.
What I could find so far:
I want to learn more about the Cold War. Any suggestions on books? I am both interested in a general outline of the period as well as studies on its impact on Europe. Perhaps also a study of the development of the nuclear arms race and how it was perceived in the public sphere. I am studying History so it does not have to be light reading but rather what you would consider the most thorough research on one of these topics.
I've been catching up with 'In our time' and just got around to listening to the Spartacus episode which for me shed new light on a somewhat familiar topic, with the discussion touching upon Spartacus's' possibly shifting motives over time and the wider contexts of slave rebellions in the ancient Roman world.
They also referenced this scene from outnumbered in which the Spartacus story is celebrated in lyrical form:
No I'm not a liar,
We'll beat you like Hannibal,
your legions are tired and your warships are rammable,
We're not for hire and we're just not bannable,
Our hearts are on fire and your houses are flammable,
So listen up, don't make a fuss and know his name is SPARTACUS!'