George Gershwin greatly admired Alban Berg and his operaWozzeck. He visited Berg in Vienna; the score he owned ofWozzeckwas reputedly one of his prize possessions; and he traveled to Philadelphia in 1931 to attend the American premiere. This study argues that Gershwin'sPorgy and Bessis heavily indebted to Berg'sWozzeck. The debts primarily involve structural processes—understanding structure as patterns of discrete events shared by the two operas. Motives and chords play a small role in the discussion, taking their place alongside musical events that range from the large—a fugue or a lullaby—to the small—a pedal, an ostinato, or some detail of counterpoint. Beyond the presence in both operas of a lullaby, a fugue, a mock sermon, and an upright piano, the greater relevance of these parallels and others is to be found in the ways in which Gershwin situated them in comparable musical contexts. Evidence, in the form of an overlooked interview and a previously unknown recollection by one of Gershwin's friends, supports this argument and leads to questions about how we are to understand Gershwin's use ofWozzeck.

This article calls attention to a database devoted to women composers and songwriters and points to a few of the historical issues that this database makes it possible to investigate. The focus is women who composed songs between roughly 1890 and 1930, and who published in the United States, Great Britain, and the British Commonwealth. The database contains more than 15,500 entries of songs and song publications by 1,607 women who wrote in all styles (including classical, popular, and a range of styles in between). The database documents the extraordinary rise and decline of women song composers that occurred in the years before and after the First World War, to identify the leading composers and the most popular poets, and to discuss differences in the careers of American and British women songwriters. Among these was the propensity for American women to self-publish, not only successful women such as Anita Owen and Carrie Jacobs Bond, but also hundreds of amateurs who published just one or two songs. The thirty women with the best representation have at least eighty songs or song collections. At the top of the list are Liza Lehmann (with 334 songs and cycles), Lily Strickland (309), Maude Valerie White (233), and Carrie Jacobs Bond (194). World War I affected women composers deeply, reducing productivity and even ending some careers as songwriters. The database also makes it possible to study shifts in the poetry women chose to set before and after the war.

Evidence for assumptions about the transmission of written polyphony in the fifteenth century comes primarily from two sources: archival references, both letters and pay records; and music manuscripts, the collections of the polyphony performed at a given centre. Unfortunately it is all too rare that specific archival references can be associated with surviving manuscripts of fifteenth-century polyphony. For some centres manuscripts have survived but not the archives, while for others there are archival references to the copying of music, but the manuscripts have disappeared. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence to indicate that many large manuscripts were compiled from what Charles Hamm termed ‘fascicle-manuscripts’ – small gatherings of bifolios just large enough to contain one long work or several short ones. By means of fascicle-manuscripts music could circulate randomly, travelling with singers from court to court, or it could be transmitted intentionally, as when the choir at one centre commissioned a piece from a composer working elsewhere. According to this argument, the large manuscripts we are familiar with may not even have been the normal repositories for music in this period. They were created only when enough fascicle-manuscripts had accumulated. These would then be recopied into a single manuscript, providing a greater degree of permanence. The manuscript San Pietrob80, a large choirbook which can now be shown to have been copied for the choir at the basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano, represents one of those rare instances when archival data can be matched to an existing manuscript.

This study of Adrian Willaert’s motet, Videns Dominus flentes sorores Lazari, demonstrates how the construction and distribution of motives indicate a particular reading of the text, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. While this reading has important elements in common with artistic renderings of the story of Jesus resurrecting Lazarus, it also demonstrates the ability of music to express a kind of meaning unavailable to artists. Willaert created a symmetrical structure with the command of Jesus to Lazarus placed in the exact middle of the motet, with events on either side ordered concentrically to represent Lazarus’s return to life. Key events in Willaert’s motet recur in Jacobus Vaet’s Videns Dominus (1562), and Hieronymus Praetorius’s double-choir motet, Videns Dominus flentes sorores Lazari (1599).

This article presents two new hypotheses about Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, op. 53 (1869), a work Brahms referred to as his "bridal song." Consulting a range of nineteenth-century sources, I explore the implications of rhapsody as a genre for this composition and argue that they include the classical convention of rhapsody as a poetic cento, or Stoppelgedicht. Centos, poems made up of quotations from earlier works, were often written for important events such as weddings; examples include the Cento nuptialis, which was discussed, among others, by August Wilhelm Ambros in his Geschichte der Musik (1864). Brahms's musical sources include Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and several works based on Goethe's Faust, including, especially, Liszt's Faust-Symphonie. My second hypothesis is that Brahms likely composed his Schicksalslied, op. 54, as a companion piece to the Alto Rhapsody. The two pieces respond to each other through several shared musical and textual correspondences. They deal in paired ways with the division between mortal suffering and otherworldly grace, and they embrace conventions and characters from antiquity. Invoking a concept proposed by Lawrence Kramer, I interpret these works as "expressive doubles" of each other. My investigation suggests that Brahms probably began work on the Rhapsody at least a year earlier than previously thought. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.