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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
David Damschroder's ongoing reformulation of harmonic theory continues with a dynamic exploration of how Beethoven molded and arranged chords to convey bold conceptions. This book's introductory chapters are organized in the manner of a nineteenth-century Harmonielehre, with individual considerations of the tonal system's key features illustrated by easy-to-comprehend block-chord examples derived from Beethoven's piano sonatas. In the masterworks section that follows, Damschroder presents detailed analyses of movements from the symphonies, piano and violin sonatas, and string quartets, and compares his outcomes with those of other analysts, including William E. Caplin, Robert Gauldin, Nicholas Marston, William J. Mitchell, Frank Samarotto, and Janet Schmalfeldt. Expanding upon analytical practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and strongly influenced by Schenkerian principles, this fresh perspective offers a stark contrast to conventional harmonic analysis - both in terms of how Roman numerals are deployed and how musical processes are described in words.
This classic study of Mozart's piano concertos is, in the words of Alfred Einstein, `full of penetrating remarks not only about the piano concerto but about Mozart's art in general'. It is here reissued with a new introduction by noted Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen, who, as well as drawing the reader's attention to the virtues of the volume, also examines at the developments in Mozart scholarship since the volume's original publication.
In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the peak of romanticism, was one of rich intellectual exploration and social change, the influence of such threads of thought on Beethoven's work has until now remained hidden beneath the surface of the notes. Beethoven's Symphonies presents a fresh look at the great composer's approach and the ideas that moved him, offering a lively account of the major themes unifying his radically diverse output. Martin Geck opens the book with an enthralling series of cultural, political, and musical motifs that run throughout the symphonies. A leading theme is Beethoven's intense intellectual and emotional engagement with the figure of Napoleon, an engagement that survived even Beethoven's disappointment with Napoleon's decision to be crowned emperor in 1804. Geck also delves into the unique ways in which Beethoven approached beginnings and finales in his symphonies, as well as his innovative use of particular instruments. He then turns to the individual symphonies, tracing elements a pitch, a chord, a musical theme that offer a new way of thinking about each work and will make even the most devoted fans of Beethoven admire the symphonies anew. Offering refreshingly inventive readings of the work of one of history's greatest composers, this book shapes a fascinating picture of the symphonies as a cohesive oeuvre and of Beethoven as a master symphonist.
Cultural, historical and reception-related contexts are central to understanding Mozart, one of the greatest and most famous musicians of all time. Widening and refining the lens through which the composer is viewed, the essays in Mozart Studies 2 focus on themes, issues, works and repertories perennially popular among Mozart scholars of all kinds, pointing to areas primed for future study and also suitable for investigation by musicians outside the scholarly community. Following on from the first Mozart Studies volume, internationally renowned contributors bring new perspectives to bear on many of Mozart's most popular works, as well as the composer's letters, biography, and reception. Chapters are grouped according to topics covered and collectively affirm the vitality of Mozart scholarship and the significant role it continues to play in defining and redefining musicological priorities in general.
The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life is well known. Austrian-born to a tyrannical father who worked him - fiercely; unhappily married to a spendthrift woman; a child-like character ill at ease amid the aristocratic splendour of the Viennese court; a musical genius who died young thus depriving the world of future glories. Yet only that last point is really true. In this comprehensive biography, John Suchet examines the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the world's best-loved composer. From his early days as a child prodigy performing for the imperial royal family in Vienna to the last months of his short life, driven to exhaustion by a punitive workload, one thing remained constant: his happy disposition. Through trials and tribulations, grand successes and disheartening setbacks, Suchet shows us the real Mozart - blessed with an abundance of talent yet sometimes struggling to earn a living. His mischievous nature and earthy sense of humour, his ease and confidence in his own incredible abilities; these were traits that never left him. His music has brought comfort to countless generations; his life, though brief, is no less fascinating.
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.
In 1829 Goethe famously described the string quartet as 'a conversation among four intelligent people'. Inspired by this metaphor, Edward Klorman's study draws on a wide variety of documentary and iconographic sources to explore Mozart's chamber works as 'the music of friends'. Illuminating the meanings and historical foundations of comparisons between chamber music and social interplay, Klorman infuses the analysis of sonata form and phrase rhythm with a performer's sensibility. He develops a new analytical method called multiple agency that interprets the various players within an ensemble as participants in stylized social intercourse - characters capable of surprising, seducing, outwitting, and even deceiving one another musically. This book is accompanied by online resources that include original recordings performed by the author and other musicians, as well as video analyses that invite the reader to experience the interplay in time, as if from within the ensemble.
The Italian opera company in Prague managed by Pasquale Bondini and Domenico Guardasoni played a central role in promoting Mozart's operas during the final years of his life. Using a wide range of primary sources which include the superb collections of eighteenth-century opera posters and concert programmes in Leipzig and the Indice de' teatrali spettacoli, an almanac of Italian singers and dancers, this study examines the annual schedules, recruitment networks, casting policies and repertoire selections of this important company. Ian Woodfield shows how Italian-language performances of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and La clemenza di Tito flourished along the well-known cultural axis linking Prague in Bohemia to Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony. The important part played by concert performances of operatic arias in the early reception of Mozart's works is also discussed and new information is presented about the reception of Josepha Duschek and Mozart in Leipzig.
Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses, she explores ways in which the quartets have both reflected and shaped the very idea of chamber music and offers a new historical understanding of the works' physical, visual, social and ideological aspects. In the process, November provides a fresh critique of three key paradigms in current Beethoven studies: the focus on his late period; the emphasis on 'heroic' style in discussions of the middle period; and the idea of string quartets as 'pure', 'autonomous' artworks, cut off from social moorings. Importantly, this study shows that the quartets encompass a new lyric and theatrical impetus, which is an essential part of their unique, explorative character.
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.
Lewis Lockwood's compelling story introduces each symphony as an individual artwork and traces the creative background of each, set against the contemporary political upheavals, the growth of concert life and the relationship to his major works in other genres. From the first symphonies to the monumental Ninth, his lifelong passion to compose works of transcendent aesthetic and moral value is brilliantly brought to life.
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.
Why couldn't Schubert get his 'great' C-Major Symphony performed? Why was he the first composer to consistently write four movements for his piano sonatas? Since neither Schubert's nor Beethoven's piano sonatas were ever performed in public, who did hear them? Addressing these questions and many others, John M. Gingerich provides a new understanding of Schubert's career and his relationship to Beethoven. Placing the genres of string quartet, symphony, and piano sonata within the cultural context of the 1820s, the book examines how Schubert was building on Beethoven's legacy. Gingerich brings new understandings of how Schubert tried to shape his career to bear on new hermeneutic readings of the works from 1824 to 1828 that share musical and extra-musical pre-occupations, centering on the 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet and the Cello Quintet, as well as on analyses of the A-minor Quartet, the Octet, and of the 'great' C-Major Symphony.
(Music Sales America). An exciting collection of classical tunes arranged for Grade 2-3 cellists to enjoy. There are simple piano accompaniments and the CD contains inspiring demonstration and play-along backing tracks. Contents: First Movement Rondo from Piano Concerto No. 4 (Beethoven) * Andante from Symphony No. 94 (Haydn) * Ave Maria (J.S. Bach/Gounod) * Finale from Symphony No. 1 (Brahms) * Gymnopedie No. 1 (Satie) * Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah (Handel) * Minuet from the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach (J.S. Bach) * Minuet from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Mozart) * Ode to Joy from Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven) * Pieds-en-l'air from Capriol Suite (Warlock) * To a Wild Rose from Woodland Sketches Op. 51 (Macdowell) * Trumpet Tune (Purcell).
David Damschroder's ongoing reformulation of harmonic theory continues with a dynamic exploration of how Beethoven molded and arranged chords to convey bold conceptions. This book's introductory chapters are organized in the manner of a nineteenth-century Harmonielehre, with individual considerations of the tonal system's key features illustrated by easy-to-comprehend block-chord examples derived from Beethoven's piano sonatas. In the masterworks section that follows, Damschroder presents detailed analyses of movements from the symphonies, piano and violin sonatas, and string quartets, and compares his outcomes with those of other analysts, including William E. Caplin, Robert Gauldin, Nicholas Marston, William J. Mitchell, Frank Samarotto, and Janet Schmalfeldt. Expanding upon analytical practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and strongly influenced by Schenkerian principles, this fresh perspective offers a stark contrast to conventional harmonic analysis - both in terms of how Roman numerals are deployed and how musical processes are described in words.
Of all the great composers of the eighteenth century, Handel was the supreme cosmopolitan, an early and extraordinarily successful example of a freelance composer. For thirty years the opera-house was the principal focus of his creative work and he composed more than forty operas over this period. In this book, David Kimbell sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts. He explores the circumstances in which they were composed and performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he composed for them. Remarkably no Handel operas were staged for a period of 170 years between 1754 and the 1920s. The final chapter in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours.
Analyzing Classical Form builds upon the foundations of the author's critically acclaimed Classical Form by offering an approach to the analysis of musical form that is especially suited for classroom use. Providing ample material for study in both undergraduate and graduate courses, Analyzing Classical Form presents the most up-to-date version of the author's "theory of formal functions." Students will learn how to make complete harmonic and formal analyses of music drawn from the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Part 1 introduces the principal theme-types of classical instrumental music; part 2 provides a methodology for analyzing sonata form, the most important formal type in this style period; and part 3 considers other full-movement forms found in this repertory (such as minuet, rondo, and concerto). The chapters are organized in a way that presents the most basic materials upfront and then leads the student through more details and finer points of theory. Every topic is illustrated with annotated musical examples; as well, the book contains many unannotated examples that can be used for in-class discussion and for out-of-class analytical exercises. A complete glossary of terms and questions for reviewing the theory will help students assimilate the many theoretical concepts employed in the book. A companion website provides audio and musical scores for all of the examples in the book as well as additional examples for the analysis of the simple theme-types presented in part 1.
Most histories of nineteenth-century music portray 'the people' merely as an audience, a passive spectator to the music performed around it. Yet, in this reappraisal of choral singing and public culture, Minor shows how a burgeoning German bourgeoisie sang of its own collective aspirations, mediated through the voice of celebrity composers. As both performer and idealized community, the chorus embodied the possibilities and limitations of a participatory, national identity. Starting with the many public festivals at which the chorus was a featured participant, Minor's account of the music written for these occasions breaks new ground not only by taking seriously these often-neglected works, but also by showing how the contested ideals of German nationhood suffused the music itself. In situating both music and festive culture within the milieu of German bourgeois liberals, this study uncovers new connections between music and politics during a century that sought to redefine both spheres.
Mozart is perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived. His music, like Shakespeare's prose, expresses every facet of the human condition, and transcends time and place. This new title in the blockbuster "Treasures" series pays tribute to Mozart's musical brilliance, covering his entire life and major works in a series of lavish spreads. Follow Mozart as he takes his first steps as a composer, tours Europe as a child genius, struggles to reconcile his artistic vision with his patrons' demands, and achieves fame but not fortune--tragically dying at only 35 years of age in abject poverty. Learn, also, about his encounter with Haydn, connection with the Masons, and marvelous operas: "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," " Cosi fan tutte," and "The Magic Flute."Boxed sidebars and facsimile documents complete the exquisite slipcased package, which comes complete with a CD of Mozart's most enchanting pieces. FACSIMILE DOCUMENTS INCLUDE: - Original scores - Letters to friends and family, including those from Mozart telling his father and sister of his mother's death- Concert posters- Concert programs- Reviews and criticisms
Presenting a fresh interpretation of Mozart's Requiem, Simon P. Keefe redresses a longstanding scholarly imbalance whereby narrow consideration of the text of this famously incomplete work has taken precedence over consideration of context in the widest sense. Keefe details the reception of the Requiem legend in general writings, fiction, theatre and film, as well as discussing criticism, scholarship and performance. Evaluation of Mozart's work on the Requiem turns attention to the autograph score, the document in which myths and musical realities collide. Franz Xaver Sussmayr's completion (1791-2) is also re-appraised and the ideological underpinnings of modern completions assessed. Overall, the book affirms that Mozart's Requiem, fascinating for interacting musical, biographical, circumstantial and psychological reasons, cannot be fully appreciated by studying only Mozart's activities. Broad-ranging hermeneutic approaches to the work, moreover, supersede traditionally limited discursive confines.
Internationally renowned scholars and performers present a wide range of new analytical, historical and critical perspectives on some of Mozart's most popular chamber music: his sonatas with violin, keyboard trios and quartets and the quintet with wind instruments. The chapters trace a broad chronology, from the childhood works, to the Mannheim and Paris sonatas with keyboard and violin, and the mature compositions from his Vienna years. Drawing upon the most recent research, this study serves the reader, be they a performer, listener or scholar, with a collection of writings that demonstrate the composer's innovative developments to generic archetypes and which explore and assess Mozart's creative response to the opportunities afforded by new and diverse instrumental combinations. Manners of performance of this music far removed from our own are revealed, with concluding chapters considering historically informed practice and the challenges for modern performers and audiences.
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.
Historians of French politics, art, philosophy and literature have long known the tensions and fascinations of Louis XV's reign, the 1750s in particular. David Charlton's study comprehensively re-examines this period, from Rameau to Gluck and elucidates the long-term issues surrounding opera. Taking Rousseau's Le Devin du Village as one narrative centrepiece, Charlton investigates this opera's origins and influences in the 1740s and goes on to use past and present research to create a new structural model that explains the elements of reform in Gluck's tragedies for Paris. Charlton's book opens many new perspectives on the musical practices and politics of the period, including the Querelle des Bouffons. It gives the first detailed account of intermezzi and opere buffe performed by Eustachio Bambini's troupe at the Paris Opera from August 1752 to February 1754 and discusses Rameau's comedies Platee and Les Paladins and their origins. |
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