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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has held musical audiences captive for close to two centuries. Few other musical works hold such a prominent place in the collective imagination; each generation rediscovers the work for itself and makes it its own. Honing in on the significance of the symphony in contemporary culture, this book establishes a dialog between Beethoven's world and ours, marked by the earthshattering events of 1789 and of 1989. In particular, this book outlines what is special about the Ninth in millennial culture. In the present day, music is encoded not only as score but also as digital technology. We encounter Beethoven 9 flashmobs, digitally reconstructed concert halls, globally synchonized performances, and other time-bending procedures. The digital artwork 9 Beet Stretch even presents the Ninth at glacial speed over twenty-four hours, challenges our understanding of the symphony, and encourages us to confront the temporal dimension of Beethoven's music. In the digital age, the Ninth emerges as a musical work that is recomposed and reshaped-and that is robust enough to live up to such treatment-continually adapting to a changing world with changing media.
Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart makes a significant contribution to music theory and to the growing conversation on metric perception and musical composition. Focusing on the chamber music of Haydn and Mozart produced during the years 1787 to 1791, the period of most intense metric experimentation in the output of both composers, author Danuta Mirka presents a systematic discussion of metric manipulations in music of the late 18th-century. By bringing together historical and present-day theoretical approaches to rhythm and meter on the basis of their shared cognitive orientations, the book places the ideas of 18th-century theorists such as Riepe, Sulzer, Kirnberger and Koch into dialogue with modern concepts in cognitive musicology, particularly those of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, David Temperley, and Justin London. In addition, the book puts considerations of subtle and complex meter found in 18th-century musical handbooks and lexicons into point-by-point contact with Harald Krebs's recent theory of metrical dissonance. The result is an innovative and illuminating reinterpretation of late 18th-century music and music perception which will have resonance in scholarship and in analytical teaching and practice. Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart will appeal to students and scholars in music theory and cognition/perception, and will also have appeal to musicologists studying Haydn and Mozart.
During the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred symphonies were written by over fifty composers living in the United States. With few exceptions, this repertoire is virtually forgotten today. In Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise, author Douglas W. Shadle explores the stunning stylistic diversity of this substantial repertoire and uncovers why it failed to enter the musical mainstream. Throughout the century, Americans longed for a distinct national musical identity. As the most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the symphony proved to be a potent vehicle in this project as composers found inspiration for their works in a dazzling array of subjects, including Niagara Falls, Hiawatha, and Western pioneers. With a wealth of musical sources at his disposal, including never-before-examined manuscripts, Shadle reveals how each component of the symphonic enterprise-from its composition, to its performance, to its immediate and continued reception by listeners and critics-contributed to competing visions of American identity. Employing an innovative transnational historical framework, Shadle's narrative covers three continents and shows how the music of major European figures such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Dvorak exerted significant influence over dialogues about the future of American musical culture. Shadle demonstrates that the perceived authority of these figures allowed snobby conductors, capricious critics, and even orchestral musicians themselves to thwart the efforts of American symphonists despite widespread public support of their music. Consequently, these works never entered the performing canons of American orchestras. An engagingly written account of a largely unknown repertoire, Orchestrating the Nation shows how artistic and ideological debates from the nineteenth century continue to shape the culture of American orchestral music today.
Discoveries from the Fortepiano meets the demand for a manual on authentic Classical piano performance practice that is at once accessible to the performer and accurate to the scholarship. Uncovering a wide range of eighteenth-century primary sources, noted keyboard pedagogue Donna Gunn examines contemporary philosophical beliefs and principles surrounding Classical Era performance practices. Gunn introduces the reader to the Viennese fortepiano and compares its sonic and technical capabilities to the modern piano. In doing so, she demonstrates how understanding Classical fortepiano performance aesthetics can influence contemporary pianists, paying particular focus to technique, dynamics, articulation, rhythm, ornamentation, and pedaling. The book is complete with over 100 music examples that illustrate concepts, as well as sample model lessons that demonstrate the application of Gunn's historically informed style on the modern piano. Each example is available on the book's companion website and is given three recordings: the first, a modern interpretation of the passage on a modern piano; the second, a fortepiano interpretation; and the third, a historically informed performance on a modern piano. With its in-depth yet succinct explanations and examples of the Viennese five-octave fortepiano and the nuances of Classical interpretation and ornamentation, Discoveries from the Fortepiano is an indispensable educational aid to any pianist who seeks an academically and artistically sound approach to the performance of Classical works.
Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer.
Georg Philipp Telemann gave us one of the richest legacies of instrumental music from the eighteenth century. Though considered a definitive contribution to the genre during his lifetime, his concertos, sonatas, and suites were then virtually ignored for nearly two centuries following his death. Yet these works are now among the most popular in the baroque repertory. In Music for a Mixed Taste , Steven Zohn considers Telemann's music from stylistic, generic, and cultural perspectives. He investigates the composer's cosmopolitan "mixed taste"-a blending of the French, Italian, English, and Polish national styles-and his imaginative expansion of this concept to embrace mixtures of the old (late baroque) and new (galant) styles. Telemann had an equally remarkable penchant for generic amalgamation, exemplified by his pioneering role in developing hybrid types such as the sonata in concerto style ("Sonate auf Concertenart") and overture-suite with solo instrument ("Concert en ouverture"). Zohn examines the extramusical meanings of Telemann's "characteristic" overture-suites, which bear descriptive texts associating them with literature, medicine, politics, religion, and the natural world, and which acted as vehicles for the composer's keen sense of musical humor. Zohn then explores Telemann's unprecedented self-publishing enterprise at Hamburg, and sheds light on the previously unrecognized borrowing by J.S. Bach from a Telemann concerto. Music for a Mixed Taste further reveals how Telemann's style polonaise generates musical and social meanings through the timeless oppositions of Orient-Occident, urban-rural, and serious-comic.
Topics are musical signs developed and employed primarily during
the long eighteenth century. Their significance relies on
associations that are clearly recognizable to the listener with
different genres, styles and types of music making. Topic theory,
which is used to explain conventional subjects of musical
composition in this period, is grounded in eighteenth-century music
theory, aesthetics, and criticism, while drawing also from music
cognition and semiotics. The concept of topics was introduced into
by Leonard Ratner in the 1980s to account for cross-references
between eighteenth-century styles and genres. As the invention of a
twentieth-century academic, topic theory as a field is
comparatively new, and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory provides
a much-needed reconstruction of the field's aesthetic
underpinnings.
In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, Inna
Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs
who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century - Catherine I,
Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with
ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her
study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical
drama, as each built theaters, established drama schools,
commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced
musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output of the
tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived,
revealing significant connections between their personal creative
aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the
political and state affairs conducted during their reigns.
Bewitching Russian Opera ultimately demonstrates that the theater
served as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which
they rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and
enacted on the musical stage political ambitions and international
conquests which they would later carry out on the world stage
itself.
Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been felt in the classroom. At the Mannes College of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at special pedagogical events around the world, he has taught generations of musical performers, composers, historians, and theorists over the course of his long career. In Fall 2012, Schachter taught a doctoral seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in which he talked about the music and the musical issues that have concerned him most deeply; the course was in essence a summation of his extensive and renowned teaching. In The Art of Tonal Analysis, music theorist Joseph Straus presents edited transcripts of those lectures. Accompanied by abundant music examples, including analytical examples transcribed from the classroom blackboard, Straus's own visualizations of material that Schachter presented aurally at the piano, and Schachter's own extended Schenkerian graphs and sketches, this book offers a vivid account of Schachter's masterful pedagogy and his deep insight into the central works of the tonal canon. In making the lectures of one of the world's most extraordinary musicians and musical thinkers available to a wide audience, The Art of Tonal Analysis is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of music.
The phrase "popular music revolution" may instantly bring to mind
such twentieth-century musical movements as jazz and rock 'n' roll.
In Sounds of the Metropolis, however, Derek Scott argues that the
first popular music revolution actually occurred in the nineteenth
century, illustrating how a distinct group of popular styles first
began to assert their independence and values. London, New York,
Paris, and Vienna feature prominently as cities in which the
challenge to the classical tradition was strongest, and in which
original and influential forms of popular music arose, from
Viennese waltz and polka to vaudeville and cabaret.
The International Who's Who in Classical Music 2007 is an unparalleled source of biographical information on singers, instrumentalists, composers, conductors and managers. The directory section lists orchestras, opera companies and other institutions connected with the classical music world. Each biographical entry comprises personal information, principal career details, repertoire, recordings and compositions, and full contact details where available. Appendices provide contact details for national orchestras, opera companies, music festivals, music organizations and major competitions and awards. Entries include individuals involved in all aspects of the world of classical music: composers, instrumentalists, singers, arrangers, writers, musicologists, conductors, directors and managers. Among those listed in this new edition are Philip Glass, Lang Lang, George Crumb, Evelyn Glennie, Yo-Yo Ma and Inga Nielsen. Over 8,000 detailed biographical entries. Covers the classical and light classical fields. Includes both up-and-coming musicians and well-established names. This book will prove invaluable for anyone in need of reliable, up-to-date information on the individuals and organizations involved in classical music.
Many of the most famous composers in classical music spent
considerable periods in spa towns, whether taking in the waters, or
searching for patrons among the rich and influential clientele who
frequented these pioneer resorts, or soaking up the relaxing and
decadent ambience of these enchanted and magical places. At Baden
bei Wein, Mozart wrote his Ave Verum Corpus, and Beethoven sketched
out his Ninth Symphony. Johannes Brahms spent 17 summers in
Baden-Baden, where he stayed in his own specially-built composing
cavern and consorted with Clara Schumann. Berlioz came to conduct
in Baden-Baden for nine seasons, writing his last major work,
Beatrice and Benedict, for the town's casino manager. Chopin,
Liszt, and Dvorak were each regular visitors to Carlsbad and
Marienbad. And it was in Carlsbad that Beethoven met Goethe.
Concerts, recitals, and resident orchestras have themselves played
a major role in the therapeutic regimes and the social and cultural
life of European and North American watering places since the late
eighteenth century. To this day, these spa towns continue to host
major music festivals of the highest caliber, drawing musicians and
loyal audiences on both local and international levels.
Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.
A slight condensation of Hanon's first exercises. The simplification in layout and range make the exercises appear less difficult to a young student.
Chapel Royal meets country choir in this collection of eleven strophic psalm-settings, one anthem and two Christmas hymns, for four-part choir without organ. These elaborate settings with fugal passages are suitable for a reasonably competent choir and could provide useful material for evensongs and concerts. The introduction attempts to explain how this London composer, who was trained in the Chapel Royal, came to write music for a country church in Hertfordshire.
Influenced by Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim,
Johannes Brahms not only learned to play the organ at the beginning
of his career, but also wrote significant compositions for the
instrument as a result of his early counterpoint study. He composed
for the organ only sporadically or as part of larger choral and
instrumental works in his subsequent career. During the final year
of his life, however, he returned to pure organ composition with a
set of chorale preludes--though many of these are thought to have
been revisions of earlier works. Today, the organ works of Johannes
Brahms are recognized as beautifully-crafted compositions by church
and concert organists across the world and have become a
much-cherished component of the repertoire. Until now, however,
most scholarly accounts of Brahms's life and work treat his works
for the organ as a minor footnote in his development as a composer.
Wilfrid Mellers is a composer, musician and author. Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. This is his classic book on Beethoven.
Throughout Spanish colonial America, limpieza de sangre (literally, "purity of blood ") determined an individual's status within the complex system of social hierarchy called casta. Within this socially stratified culture, those individuals at the top were considered to have the highest calidad-an all-encompassing estimation of a person's social status. At the top of the social pyramid were the Peninsulares: Spaniards born in Spain, who controlled most of the positions of power within the colonial governments and institutions. Making up most of the middle-class were criollos, locally born people of Spanish ancestry. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Peninsulare intellectuals asserted their cultural superiority over criollos by claiming that American Spaniards had a generally lower calidad because of their "impure " racial lineage. Still, given their Spanish heritage, criollos were allowed employment at many Spanish institutions in New Spain, including the center of Spanish religious practice in colonial America: Mexico City Cathedral. Indeed, most of the cathedral employees-in particular, musicians-were middle-class criollos. In Playing in the Cathedral, author Jesus Ramos-Kittrell explores how liturgical musicians-choristers and instrumentalists, as well as teachers and directors-at Mexico City Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century navigated changing discourses about social status and racial purity. He argues that criollos cathedral musicians, influenced by Enlightenment values of self-industry and autonomy, fought against the Peninsulare-dominated, racialized casta system. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ramos-Kittrell shows that these musicians held up their musical training and knowledge, as well as their institutional affiliation with the cathedral, as characteristics that legitimized their calidad and aided their social advancement. The cathedral musicians invoked claims of "decency " and erudition in asserting their social worth, arguing that their performance capabilities and theoretical knowledge of counterpoint bespoke their calidad and status as hombres decentes. Ultimately, Ramos-Kittrell argues that music, as a performative and theoretical activity, was a highly dynamic factor in the cultural and religious life of New Spain, and an active agent in the changing discourses of social status and "Spanishness " in colonial America. Offering unique and fascinating insights into the social, institutional, and artistic spheres in New Spain, this book is a welcome addition to scholars and graduate students with particular interests in Latin American colonial music and cultural history, as well as those interested in the intersections of music and religion.
A valuable assortment of teacher/student duets in their original form written by teachers and composers during the 18th and 19th centuries. Arranged in order of difficulty, the student parts are limited to a single five-finger position and fall primarily within the grand staff reading range. Each book includes works by such composers as Diabelli, Gurlitt, Bercucci, Wohlfahrt, Berens and others.
In late eighteenth-century Vienna and the surrounding Habsburg
territories, over 50 minor-key symphonies by at least 11 composers
were written. These include some of the best-known works of the
symphonic repertoire, such as Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and
Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. The driving energy,
intense pathos and restlessness of these compositions demand close
attention and participation from the listener, and pose urgent
questions about meaning and interpretation.
The study of the social context of music must consider the day-to-day experiences of its practitioners. This book traces the daily working life and aspirations of British musicians during the sweeping social and economic transformation of Britain from 1750 to 1850. It features working musicians of all types and at all levels--organists, singers, instrumentalists, teachers, composers, and entrepreneurs--and explores their educational background, their conditions of employment, their wages, the systems of patronage that supported them, and their individual perceptions.
This book combines a performance guide for violinists, an analytical study, an exploration of Bach's style, and an investigation of musical form and continuity. J.S. Bach's three sonatas and three partitas for solo violin have been mainstays of the violin concert repertoire since the mid-nineteenth century; their long performance history, evidenced in recordings as well as in editions, offers an opportunity to study the ways in which notions of Baroque style have evolved. Central to the book is the question what type of analysis is best applied to Bach's music: wherever possible, Lester draws his analytical tools from eighteenth-century techniques, developed for this repertoire. |
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