Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

New Orleans Rhythm Kings [NORK; Friars Society Orchestra].

American jazz band. Its three principal members, trumpeter Paul (Joseph) Mares (1900–49), trombonist Georg(e Clarence) Brunis (1902–74) and clarinettist (Joseph) Leon Roppolo (1902–43), were boyhood friends from New Orleans who were reunited in Chicago in the early 1920s to form an eight-piece band for a 17-month residency at the Friar’s Inn nightclub. The instantaneous success of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings’ recordings and live performances made it the most important white New Orleans group after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Although the players never achieved the same widespread fame, and despite the fact that they based their style and repertory partly on those of the earlier band, on several counts they were superior to it. Their originality lay in blending the influences of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band with inspiration derived from the black New Orleans music of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. The New Orleans Rhythm Kings exuded a sense of relaxation that was rare among its contemporaries; the musicians avoided the nearly ubiquitous jerky phrasing, and with no loss of expression concentrated on legato playing. The final choruses of their performances are stirring without seeming frantic.

Mares, the group’s leader, was heavily influenced by King Oliver’s cornet playing. He usually remained in the middle register and established an emphatic lead part; during his solos he seldom departed from the melody, relying on subtle rhythmic and tonal inflections for variation. The group’s foremost improviser was Roppolo, whose highly original solos on Panama, Tiger Rag (both 1922, Bennett) and She’s Crying for me Blues (1925, OK) are superb. His playing on the ingeniously arranged Wolverine Blues (1923, Bennett) was much copied. Georg Brunis also played confident, adept solos, but his strength lay in creating clever ‘tailgate’ patterns, many of which were rigorously imitated by other trombonists for decades afterwards. The band’s front line inspired a school of young white Chicago jazz musicians, and it is regrettable that so few of its recordings are satisfactorily balanced.

After leaving the Friar’s Inn the group enjoyed brief residencies at two Chicago dance halls before disbanding altogether. In 1924–5 it was revived in New Orleans, but without notable success.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. Beall: ‘The New Orleans Rhythm Kings’, Frontiers of Jazz (New York, 1947, 2/1962), 82–91

G. Erskine: ‘Last of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings’, Down Beat, xxix/10 (1962), 22–3

M. Williams: ‘N.O.R.K.’,Jazz Masters of New Orleans (New York, 1967/R), 121–35

D. Coller: ‘Frank Snyder’, Mississippi Rag, x/6 (1983), 7

B. Kernfeld: What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven, CT, 1995)

JOHN CHILTON

New Philharmonia Orchestra [NPO].

Name used between 1964 and 1977 by the Philharmonia Orchestra, a London orchestra founded in 1945. See London, §VII, 3.

New Queen’s Hall Orchestra.

London orchestra founded in 1895 and known as the Queen’s Hall Orchestra until 1915. See London (i), §VI, 2.

Newsidler.

See Neusidler family.

New South Wales Conservatorium of Music.

Conservatory founded in Sydney in 1915.

Newton, Sir Isaac

(b Woolsthorpe, nr Grantham, 25 Dec 1642; d Kensington, London, 20 March 1727). English mathematician and natural philosopher. He was Luasian Professor of mathematics at Cambridge (1669–1701), MP for the university (1689–90), Master of the Mint (1699–1727) and president of the Royal Society (from 1703). He was knighted in 1705, and buried in Westminster Abbey. His principal publications were Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687) and Opticks (London, 1704).

Newton never published on practical music theory, and so his original work in this field had no influence on later music theorists and remained unrecognized until the 20th century. The significant role that music (or, more precisely, harmonics) played in his scientific thought has taken longer still to be appreciated fully. His earliest work on music is found in two commonplace-books he used while at Trinity College, Cambridge, between about 1664 and 1666. The first (GB-Cu Add.3996) contains reflections on the acoustical properties of musical sound, while the second (Cu Add.4000) includes a short treatise Of Music (ff.138–43; versions also in Ccl, Cjc, Och) and several pages of tightly written mathematical calculations (ff.104–13, 137). The extracts he copied from Christopher Simpson's Division Violist (1659) may also date from this period (Cu Add.3970, ff.12–15), or else some time from the late 1680s, when he acquired a copy of Thomas Salmon's ‘Division of the Monochord’ (ff.1–11).

Arts students in Restoration Cambridge typically studied harmonics as a branch of mathematics, but Newton's treatment of the subject was exceptional. Of most interest is his application of logarithms to the division of the musical scale. Although Brouncker had already published on this in 1653, Newton was the first to express the magnitude of intervals in a logarithmic notation. He took the equal-tempered half tone as his basic unit or ‘common measure’, thereby anticipating the modern cent system. Apart from expressing the ratios of the syntonic diatonic scale (just scale) using this system, he considered various forms of multiple division (e.g. 12, 20, 24, 25, 29, 36, 41, 51, 53, 100, 120 and 612 parts to the octave), concluding that the 53-division was best. He also compiled a ‘catalogue’ of the ‘twelve musical modes in their order of gratefulness’ and devised a scheme on how to pass from one mode to another.

In 1677 Newton was asked to comment on Francis North's Philosophical Essay of Music (1677) by the latter's brother John, Master of Trinity College. He disagreed with North's explanation of sound transmission, and found his pulse theory of consonance inadequate. 11 years later he presented the first mathematical analysis of sound waves in his Philosophiae, providing a model for all forms of wave motion.

Thus although Newton never published specifically on music, he applied the insights gained from studying musical phenomena to other branches of mathematical science, especially optics and mechanics. The best-known example is his famous analogy between the seven tones of a musical scale and the seven colours of the spectrum, made public for the first time in Opticks. He first explored this link between 1672 and 1675, when chronology and biblical prophecy involving numerological speculation occupied much of his attention.

Music also played a role in the development of his laws of universal gravitation. In the 1690s he claimed that Pythagoras had known the inverse square law theory, but had expressed it allegorically (e.g. the myth of the harmony of the spheres and the legend of the blacksmiths). Newton was himself a Pythagorean in that his concern was with abstract mathematical harmonies underlying the cosmos, rather than the sensual impact of lived musical experience.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FétisB

HawkinsH

H.W. Turnbull, ed.: The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1959–77), ii, 205–8

S. Dostrovsky: ‘Early Vibration Theory: Physics and Music in the Seventeenth Century’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences (1974–5), xiv, 169–218

P.M. Gouk: ‘The Harmonic Roots of Newtonian Science’, Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on his Life and Works, ed. J. Fauvel and others (Oxford, 1988), 101–25

P.M. Gouk: Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 1999), 224–57

PENELOPE GOUK