Editor’s Note

The contributions to this issue follow recent historiographical trends in musicology toward micro-histories, but do so with surprising twists on subjects that used to dominate macro-histories of music.Amanda Stein explores a new angle on one of the most vexing issues of nineteenth-century instrumental music: the relationship between so-called absolute and program music. This relationship had a lasting influence on our discipline because it revolved around the central question of musical meaning. This question was never only aesthetic but also political; never merely about a composer’s intentions but also about their identity; never just about an idea, but also about its impact. Inasmuch as absolute music acquired its value through the ineffable expression of a universalist ideal that transcended historical contingencies, Stein explores the very contingency of that ideal. She narrates the performance history of Friedrich Gernsheim’s Third Symphony, whose biblical program—the story of Mirjam—was fully revealed only two decades after its 1888 premiere. In her account, the underlying aesthetic conundrum—whether or not that program actually aligned with the music—became symptomatic for the predicament of Gernsheim’s qualified assimilation. He experienced the kinds of professional headwinds that Gustav Mahler, who considered performing the work, acknowledged in a telling nod to his fellow Jewish composer.John Y. Lawrence’s approach to Sullivan’s settings of Gilbert’s lyrics continues the journal’s path of proffering new tools from musicology’s disciplinary twin for the analysis of unexpected corpora. Noteworthy is how he transfers the declamatory schemas that Yonatan Malin originally devised for the Kunstlied to Savoy opera; and how, once trained on an ostensibly minor genre, the tool generates striking insights. Sullivan’s “delight in pulling the rug out from under the poetic feet” was not just sly but also savvy. He approached these schemas with a “transformational attitude” that shaped a compositional method for producing unique metric footprints (pun intended). His text-setting system for the assembly-line of the Gilbert and Sullivan franchise was not only efficient but also effective in manufacturing a novel style of musical declamation, whose prosody of off-beat “punches” perfectly matched the off-kilter antics of comic stage action.Jacek Blaszkiewicz’s vignettes of female pianists trained in sightreading at the Paris Conservatoire tell a hitherto untold story of emancipation via professionalization. Showcasing their abilities at a special exam the Conservatoire cultivated as a public competition, these déchiffreuses later devoted themselves to careers in piano pedagogy, often aimed at teaching how to decipher music à vue. In Blaszkiewicz’s telling, they are not hidden figures, for their foils are famous composers like Fauré, who created bespoke pieces for the exam; and powerful critics who mercilessly judged both pieces and players—until Nadia Boulanger challenged them with her own modernist morceaux de déchiffrage that critics would pan for its “web-like indecipherability.” Later, Boulanger’s famous (male) American students, including Aaron Copland and Philip Glass, singled out sight-reading as a particularly grueling portion of their education.I have paired Blaszkiewicz’s article with my own Object Lesson about the still largely unknown composer Mel Bonis (1858–1937), not only because she was a superior student who likely excelled as a déchiffreuse during her abbreviated studies at the Conservatoire, but also because my visit with her great-granddaughter in June 2025 occasioned an extraordinary opportunity to grasp Bonis’s pianism through her hand.