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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
This book discusses the myriad ways in which Beethoven begins his works and the structural, rhetorical, and emotional implications of these beginnings for listeners. Examining the opening moments of nearly 200 compositions, it offers a new method of analysis of Beethoven's music. At the same time, it sets Beethoven's work in context through a close study of beginnings in the compositions of the Classical Era.
First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The theoretical and musical background to the relationship between the piano and orchestra in Mozart's concertos. The interactive relationship between the piano and the orchestra in Mozart's concertos is an issue central to the appreciation of these great works, but one that has not yet received serious attention, a gap which this new study seeks to remedy by exploring the historical implications and hermeneutic potential of dramatic dialogue. The author shows that invocations of dramatic dialogue are deeply ingrained in late-eighteenth-century writings on instrumental music, and he develops this theme into an original and highly positive view of solo/orchestra relations in Mozart's concertos. He analyses behavioural patterns in the concertos and links them to theoretical discussion oflate-eighteenth-century drama and to analogous relational development in Mozart's operas Idomeneo, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Mozart's piano concertos emerge afresh from this new approach as an extraordinary medium of Enlightenment, as significant in their way as the greatest late-eighteenth-century operatic and theatrical works. SIMON P. KEEFE is James Rossiter Hoyle Chair of Music, University of Sheffield.
The vibrant intellectual, social and political climate of mid eighteenth-century Europe presented opportunities and challenges for artists and musicians alike. This book focuses on Mozart the man and musician as he responds to different aspects of that world. It reveals his views on music, aesthetics and other matters; on places in Austria and across Europe that shaped his life; on career contexts and environments, including patronage, activities as an impresario, publishing, theatrical culture and financial matters; on engagement with performers and performance, focusing on Mozart's experiences as a practicing musician; and on reception and legacy from his own time through to the present day. Probing diverse Mozartian contexts in a variety of ways, the contributors reflect the vitality of existing scholarship and point towards areas primed for further study. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of late eighteenth-century music and for Mozart aficionados and music lovers in general.
This anthology to accompany Gateways to Understanding Music is comprised of musical "texts." These broadly defined texts-primarily musical scores-facilitate the integration of score study and music theory into the ethno/musicology curriculum, a necessary focus in the training of the professional musician. As posed by the textbook, the last question in each modular "gateway" is "Where do I go from here?" This resource provides one more opportunity to go beyond the textbook to examine music scores and texts in even greater depth. This anthology is a combination of primary sources for study: musical scores and music transcriptions, along with a few primary source documents and musical exercises.
Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.
Empress Marie Therese, second wife of Emperor Franz II, devoted much of her life to music. She played piano and sang, compiled a large music library and supported professional musicians and composers. This comprehensive survey of the Empress as musician and patron is based upon John Rice's discovery and analysis of extensive unpublished material from her private collection. In this work Rice introduces readers to the musical and cultural worlds of the Viennese court at the end of the eighteenth century.
How did revolutionary America appear to European audiences through their opera glasses? The operas studied in this volume are populated by gun-toting and slave-holding Quakers, handsome Native Americans, female middle-class political leaders, rebellious British soldiers and generous businessmen. Most of them display an unprecedented configuration of social and gender roles, which led leading composers of the time, including Mozart, Haydn, Anfossi, Piccinni and Paisiello, to introduce far-reaching innovations in the musical and dramatic fabric of Italian opera. Polzonetti presents a fresh perspective on the European cultural reception of American social and political identity. Through detailed but accessible analysis of music examples, including previously unpublished musical sources, the book documents and explains important transformations of opera at the time of Mozart's masterpieces, and its long-term consequences up to Puccini. Shedding new light on familiar and less-familiar operatic works, the study represents groundbreaking research in music, cultural and political history.
In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, author 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. Through contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical theater productions-from Catherine the Great's fairy tale operas to Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame-illuminates the transition of these royal women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal dominance of the subsequent period. These tsarinas successfully fostered the concept of a modern nation and collective national identity, only to then have their power and influence undone in Russian cultural consciousness through the fairy-tales operas of the 19th century that positioned tsarinas as "magical" and dangerous figures rightfully displaced and conquered-by triumphant heroes on the stage, and by the new patriarchal rulers in the state. Ultimately, this book 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 performed on the musical stage political ambitions and international conquests which they would later enact on the world stage itself.
This handbook for flautists addresses all who wish to consider the issues raised when performing music of the past, and experiment with them on old or new instruments. Its aim is to provide an authoritative and practical guide with evidence drawn from a variety of primary sources directly and indirectly associated with the flute. The author provides sound advice on instruments and their care, historical techniques, stylistic issues and historically informed interpretation, with examples drawn from a wide range of case studies, including Bach, Handel, Mozart and Brahms.
How did Ludwig van Beethoven help overthrow a tsarist regime? With the establishment of the Russian Musical Society and its affiliated branches throughout the empire, Beethoven's music reached substantially larger audiences at a time of increasing political instability. In addition, leading music critics of the regime began hearing Beethoven's dramatic works as nothing less than a call to revolution. Beethoven in Russia deftly explores the interface between music and politics in Russia by examining the reception of Beethoven's works from the late 18th century to the present. In part 1, Frederick W. Skinner's clear and sweeping review examines the role of Beethoven's more dramatic works in the revolutionary struggle that culminated in the Revolution of 1917. In part 2, Skinner reveals how this same power was again harnessed to promote Stalin's campaign of rapid industrialization. The appropriation of Beethoven and his music to serve the interests of the state remained the hallmark of Soviet Beethoven reception until the end of communist rule. With interdisciplinary appeal in the areas of history, music, literature, and political thought, Beethoven in Russia shows how Beethoven's music served as a call to action for citizens and weaponized state propaganda in the great political struggles that shaped modern Russian history.
Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' - a symbolic duo, who represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast was to shape the composition, performance, reception and historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogue with each other, with the aim of unpicking the origins, consequences and fallacies of the opposition between the two composers and what they came to represent. In fifteen chapters, contributors explore topics ranging from the concert lives of early nineteenth-century capitals to the mythmaking of early cinema, and from the close analysis of individual works by Beethoven and Rossini to the cultural politics of nineteenth-century music histories.
Schubert wrote approximately 650 songs, based on poems by some 110 authors. Goethe led this formidable list, but after Goethe, came Johann Mayrhofer, now a totally forgotten poet. Schubert set 47 songs and two operas to Mayrhofer's writings. Here, each song and the two operas are discussed within musical and literary perspectives. Background information and technical vocabulary have been kept at a minimum but new translations of the Lieder are included.
With their insistence that form is a dialectical process in the music of Beethoven, Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus emerge as the guardians of a long-standing critical tradition in which Hegelian concepts have been brought to bear on the question of musical form. Janet Schmalfeldt's ground-breaking account of the development of this Beethoven-Hegelian tradition restores to the term "form" some of its philosophical associations in the early nineteenth century, when profound cultural changes were yielding new relationships between composers and their listeners, and when music itself-in particular, instrumental music-became a topic for renewed philosophical investigation. Precedents for Adorno's and Dahlhaus's concept of form as process arise in the Athenaum Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel and in the Encyclopaedia Logic of Hegel. The metaphor common to all these sources is the notion of becoming; it is the idea of form coming into being that this study explores in respect to music by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. A critical assessment of Dahlhaus's preoccupation with the opening of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata serves as the author's starting point for the translation of philosophical ideas into music-analytical terms-ones that encourage listening "both forward and backward," as Adorno has recommended. Thanks to the ever-growing familiarity of late eighteenth-century audiences with formal conventions, composers could increasingly trust that performers and listeners would be responsive to striking formal transformations. The author's analytic method strives to capture the dynamic, quasi-narrative nature of such transformations, rather than only their end results. This experiential approach to the perception of form invites listeners and especially performers to participate in the interpretation of processes by which, for example, a brooding introduction-like opening must inevitably become the essential main theme in Schubert's Sonata, Op. 42, or in which tremendous formal expansions in movements by Mendelssohn offer a dazzling opportunity for multiple retrospective reinterpretations. Above all, In the Process of Becoming proposes new ways of hearing beloved works of the romantic generation as representative of their striving for novel, intensely self-reflective modes of communication.
This book contains a variety of songs and dances, originally written in the 12th through 16th centuries, arranged for the harp. The majority of the pieces are drawn from the medieval period and often existed in their original form as melody line only. All of the pieces in this book are playable on the folk harp.
The Orchestral Revolution explores the changing listening culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Delving into Enlightenment philosophy, the nature of instruments, compositional practices and reception history, this book describes the birth of a new form of attention to sonority and uncovers the intimate relationship between the development of modern musical aesthetics and the emergence of orchestration. By focusing upon Joseph Haydn's innovative strategies of orchestration and tracing their reception and influence, Emily Dolan shows that the consolidation of the modern orchestra radically altered how people listened to and thought about the expressive capacity of instruments. The orchestra transformed from a mere gathering of instruments into an ideal community full of diverse, nuanced and expressive characters. In addressing this key moment in the history of music, Dolan demonstrates the importance of the materiality of sound in the formation of the modern musical artwork.
A decade after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had given way to an era of retrenchment and repression, 1824 became a watershed year. The premiere of the Ninth Symphony, the death of Lord Byron - who had been aiding the Greeks in their struggle for independence, Delacroix's painting of the Turkish massacre of Greeks at Chios and Pushkin's anti-tyrannical play Boris Godunov all signalled that the desire for freedom was not dead. And all of these works and events were part of the flowering of the High Romantic period. In The Ninth, eminent music historian and biographer Harvey Sachs employs memoir, anecdote and his vast knowledge of history to explain how the premiere of Beethoven's staggering last symphony was emblematic of its time - a work of art unlike any other - and a magisterial, humanistic statement that remains a challenge down to our own day and for future generations.
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.
Heinrich Schenker ranks among the most important figures in the development of western music theory in the twentieth century. His approach to the analysis of music permeates nearly every aspect of the field and continues to this day to be a topic of great interest among music theorists, historians, composers and performers. In his four volume work, Die letzen Sonaten von Beethoven: Kritische Ausgabe mit Einfuhrung und Erlauterung (The Last Piano Sonatas by Beethoven: Critical edition with Introduction and Commentary) Schenker presented editions of Beethoven's Opp. 109, 110, 111 and 101 that were, at the time, unprecedented in their faithfulness to such authoritative sources as Beethoven's autograph manuscripts. He included a movement-by-movement and section-by-section discussion of form and content that grew increasingly penetrating from one volume to the next as the musical theory for which he is now known was developed, alongside inspired and detailed suggestions for the performance of each section of each work. InBeethoven's Last Piano Sonatas: An Edition, with Elucidation, noted Schenker scholar John Rothgeb presents the first English language edition and translation of these important works. Rothgeb builds upon Schenker's text, adding explanations of certain points in the commentary, references to corrections and other remarks entered by Schenker in his personal copies of the volumes, and graphic presentations of several passages (a practice that became standard in Schenker's own analytical work later in his career). Making these seminal works accessible to English speaking scholars and students for the first time, Beethoven's Last Piano Sonatas is an essential reference for music theorists, historians, performers, and composers alike.
Heinrich Schenker ranks among the most important figures in the development of western music theory in the twentieth century. His approach to the analysis of music permeates nearly every aspect of the field and continues to this day to be a topic of great interest among music theorists, historians, composers and performers. In his four volume work, Die letzen Sonaten von Beethoven: Kritische Ausgabe mit Einfuhrung und Erlauterung (The Last Piano Sonatas by Beethoven: Critical edition with Introduction and Commentary) Schenker presented editions of Beethoven's Opp. 109, 110, 111 and 101 that were, at the time, unprecedented in their faithfulness to such authoritative sources as Beethoven's autograph manuscripts. He included a movement-by-movement and section-by-section discussion of form and content that grew increasingly penetrating from one volume to the next as the musical theory for which he is now known was developed, alongside inspired and detailed suggestions for the performance of each section of each work. In Beethoven's Last Piano Sonatas: An Edition, with Elucidation, noted Schenker scholar John Rothgeb presents the first English language edition and translation of these important works. Rothgeb builds upon Schenker's text, adding explanations of certain points in the commentary, references to corrections and other remarks entered by Schenker in his personal copies of the volumes, and graphic presentations of several passages (a practice that became standard in Schenker's own analytical work later in his career). Making these seminal works accessible to English speaking scholars and students for the first time, Beethoven's Last Piano Sonatas is an essential reference for music theorists, historians, performers, and composers alike.
Heinrich Schenker ranks among the most important figures in the development of western music theory in the twentieth century. His approach to the analysis of music permeates nearly every aspect of the field and continues to this day to be a topic of great interest among music theorists, historians, composers and performers. In his four volume work, Die letzen Sonaten von Beethoven: Kritische Ausgabe mit Einfuhrung und Erlauterung (The Last Piano Sonatas by Beethoven: Critical edition with Introduction and Commentary) Schenker presented editions of Beethoven's Opp. 109, 110, 111 and 101 that were, at the time, unprecedented in their faithfulness to such authoritative sources as Beethoven's autograph manuscripts. He included a movement-by-movement and section-by-section discussion of form and content that grew increasingly penetrating from one volume to the next as the musical theory for which he is now known was developed, alongside inspired and detailed suggestions for the performance of each section of each work. In Beethoven's Last Piano Sonatas: An Edition, with Elucidation, noted Schenker scholar John Rothgeb presents the first English language edition and translation of these important works. Rothgeb builds upon Schenker's text, adding explanations of certain points in the commentary, references to corrections and other remarks entered by Schenker in his personal copies of the volumes, and graphic presentations of several passages (a practice that became standard in Schenker's own analytical work later in his career). Making these seminal works accessible to English speaking scholars and students for the first time, Beethoven's Last Piano Sonatas is an essential reference for music theorists, historians, performers, and composers alike.
Arguably one of the most influential and revered figures in contemporary music theory, David Lewin (1933-2003) revolutionized the field through his work on transformational theory and theoretical methodology. David Lewin's Morgengruss: Text, Context, Commentary presents in print for the first time Lewin's legendary 1974 essay on Franz Schubert's "Morgengruss," from the composer's song cycle, Die Schoene Mullerin. The essay was central to Lewin's graduate teaching, and copies of it have circulated by hand through the music-scholarly community for decades. This book presents the original text of Lewin's essay along with over 200 graphical illustrations. Lewin's ability to present an artful and rich argument, based on a close reading of a short, "simple" score is but one of the wonders to behold in his masterful essay. At once deeply nuanced and widely accessible, Lewin's "Morgengruss" offers insight into Schubert's composition as well as the analytical process itself. Along with the full text of Lewin's essay, this book includes a small but pointed collection of essays interpreting the content and significance of Lewin's "Morgengruss." Drawing on current research as well as personal reflection, editors Richard Cohn and David Bard-Schwarz, along with contributors Brian Kane and Henry Klumpenhouwer, elaborate on the analytical, pedagogical, and philosophical contexts of Lewin's work. Taken together, the editors and contributors offer a compelling account of the enduring significance of Lewin's writing. David Lewin's Morgengruss is a must-have for anyone with an interest in Lewin's career, Schubert's music, or music theory generally.
Did you know that Beethoven contemplated, however fleetingly, writing more than forty symphonies and that for the Missa solemnis he sought stimulus from a Latin-German dictionary? And what about the underappreciated sociable side of Beethoven's music to set alongside the familiar one of the heroic? Beethoven Studies 4 is a collection of ten chapters that approach the composer and his music from an appealing range of critical standpoints, aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice. The volume will appeal to cultural historians and practitioners as well as Beethoven enthusiasts. |
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