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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > 20th century music
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Shostakovich in Dialogue - Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 (Hardcover, New edition)
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Shostakovich in Dialogue - Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 (Hardcover, New edition)
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A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long
overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most
significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for
that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study
of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study,
undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the
universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned
from the historical context and an examination of the music's
language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has
been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting
interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological
'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single
meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the
quartets as political in nature, although there have been
contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal
communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as
vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a
chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to
examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and
times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil,
the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place
of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society.
Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works
through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master
narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets
as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled
with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these
diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn,
looking first at its historical and biographical context, with
special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the
time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history,
and follows with a critical discussion of the quartet's
architectural and harmonic features. Using the new tools of Sonata
Theory, Kuhn provides a fresh analytical approach to Shostakovich's
music, giving valuable and detailed insights into the quartets,
showing how the composer's mastery of form has enabled these works
to be heard as active participants in the Soviet and Western
cultural discourses of their time, while remaining compelling and
relevant to twenty-first-century listeners.
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