Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Neubauer [Neubaur, Niebuhr], Johann

(fl mid-17th century). German composer. On 9 August 1649 he dedicated from Kassel to Landgrave Wilhelm VI of Hesse a collection of four- and five-part dances with continuo that was probably intended for publication but remained in manuscript: Neue Pavaner, Galliarden, Balletten, Couranten, Allemanden und Sarabanden (in D-Kl). He is otherwise not heard of at Kassel or indeed anywhere else. He has been confused with Georg Nub, a musician at the Vienna court. A sacred vocal work (also in Kl) is attributed to him, as were three others (now lost, formerly in D-Lm). His 1649 collection consists of eight suites. Five comprise the first four dances listed in the title; to each of the other three an allemande and saraband are added in the mode opposite to that of the rest of the suite (e.g. in no.7, which is in C major, the extra movements are in C minor). The dances within a suite are not thematically related.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (C. Engelbrecht) [incl. fuller bibliography]

H. Walter: Musikgeschichte der Stadt Lüneburg (Tutzing, 1967), 171, 174–5

Neuber, Ulrich

(b ?Prague; d Nuremberg, 1571). German printer, brother of Valentin Neuber. His professional dealings with the city of Prague suggest that he may have been born there. He married Margaretha Rüplin in 1539 and in 1541 became a citizen of Nuremberg, where he founded a printing house with Johann vom Berg. The firm of Berg and Neuber, which flourished 1541–63, published at least 122 editions of music, notably motet anthologies. After Berg's death in 1563, its colophon changed to ‘Ulrich Neuber and Johann vom Berg's heirs’; after the marriage of Berg's widow Katherina vom Berg to Dietrich Gerlach in 1565 it changed again to that of Gerlach and Neuber. Neuber left the firm and started his own between 1566 and 1568, and in 1569 he bought a house ‘am Ponersberg’. He took over some of the catalogue of the joint firm and successfully published these and other items.

In 1573, Neuber's widow married the printer Valentin Geissler, who later became an official printer to the Nuremberg city council. Of Neuber's seven children, one son, Georg (Jörg), was active as a printer (in Nuremberg in the 1570s), and another, Wolfgang, became a bookseller. Christoff Neuber, also a printer, was probably either a cousin or a brother of Ulrich.

For bibliography see Berg, Johann vom

SUSAN JACKSON

Neuber, Valentin

(b ?Prague; d Nuremberg, bur. 6 Feb 1590). German printer, brother of Ulrich Neuber. In 1548 he married Kungund Wachter, the widow of Hans Wachter, and thereby became heir to Wachter’s printing firm; in the following year he received Nuremberg citizenship, and from 1583 he was a member of the greater city council. He published a large number of polyphonic lieder and monophonic kirchenlieder and some works on music theory, such as Listenius’s Musica and several editions of Heinrich Faber’s Compendiolum musicae. Neuber was probably closely related to Christoff Neuber, another Nuremberg printer. One of his heirs was Hans Neuber, a lutenist in Prague; this fact and his dealings with the city of Prague suggest that he may have been born there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P. Cohen: Musikdruck und -Drucker zu Nürnberg im sechzehnten Jahrhundert (Nuremberg, 1927) [incl. list of titles]

R. Wagner: ‘Nachträge zur Geschichte der Nürnberger Musikdrucker im sechzehnten Jahrhundert’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, xxx (1931), 109–51

S. Jackson: Johann vom Berg and Ulrich Neuber: Music Printers in Sixteenth-Century Nuremberg (diss., CUNY, 1998)

THEODOR WOHNHAAS, SUSAN JACKSON

Neue Bach-Gesellschaft.

See Bach-Gesellschaft.

Neue Deutsche Welle.

See New wave.

Neue Einfachheit (Ger.: ‘New Simplicity’).

A short-lived movement that flourished in the later 1970s and early 1980s, conceived in reaction to the formalized, abstracted compositional procedures of postwar avant-garde music. Although some critics argued that such composers as Henze and Reimann were forerunners of the Neue Einfachheit, it was essentially a tendency within the younger generation of German composers, such as Hans-Jürgen von Bose (b 1953), Hans-Christian von Dadelsen (b 1948), Detlev Müller-Siemens (b 1957), Wolfgang Rihm (b 1952), Wolfgang von Schweinitz (b 1953), Ulrich Stranz (b 1946) and Manfred Trojahn (b 1949). They sought a more immediate relationship, unmediated by complex precompositional planning, between their creative impulse and its musical expression and, by extension, between their music and its listeners. This intended directness of expression was an echo of the ‘Einfachheit’ to which the authors of the 18th- and 19th-century German lied had aspired, but it was most usually represented in works of the Neue Einfachheit by a re-engagement with the gestural and tonal language of late Romantic German music, by a return to more traditional instrumental groupings, such as the string quartet and symphony orchestra, and, in works involving text, often by the use of specifically German subject matter.

Other terms used to categorize this music included ‘Neue Innigkeit’ (new inwardness), ‘New (or Neo-) Romanticism’, ‘New Sensuality’ and ‘New Tonality’. Confusingly, the English term ‘New Simplicity’ was also used of minimalist music. Of the composers of the Neue Einfachheit only Dadelsen, however, has made significant use of repetition and the Neue Einfachheit is perhaps best understood as an essentially national phenomenon, a musical equivalent of the revival of figurative and other representational imagery in the ‘New German Painting’ of Baselitz and Lüppertz, which also achieved critical prominence during the same period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O. Kolleritsch, ed.: Zur ‘Neuen Einfachheit’ in der Musik (Vienna, 1981)

C. von Blumröder: ‘Formel-Komposition – Minimal Music – Neue Einfachheit: musikalische Konzeptionen der siebziger Jahre’, Neuland, ii (1981–2), 183–205

D. Rexroth: ‘New Music: Autonomy and Presentation’, CMR, xii (1995), 5–12

A. Heidenreich: ‘Ein Rhythmus in Alltäglichen’, Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, 1946–1996, 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse für neue Musik, ed. R. Stephan and others (Stuttgart, 1996), 487–93

W.-E. von Lewinski: ‘Die jungen deutschen Komponisten der siebziger Jahre’, ibid., 444–9

CHRISTOPHER FOX