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Unfinished Music (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,840
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Unfinished Music (Hardcover)
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Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism
by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: "the work is the
death mask of its conception." The work in its finished, perfected
state conceals the enlivening process engaged in its creation. An
opening chapter of this book examines some explosive ideas from the
mind of J. G. Hamann, eccentric figure of the anti-rationalist
Enlightenment, on the place of language at the seat of thought.
These ideas are pursued as an entry into the no less radical mind
of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose bold idiosyncrasies, like
Hamann's, disrupted the discourse of Enlightenment aesthetics. Bach
is a central player here, his late music the subject of fresh
inquiry. In several chapters on the late music of Beethoven, Bach
reappears, now something of a spiritual alter ego in the search for
a new voice. The improvisatory as a mode of thought figures
prominently here, and then inspires a new hearing of the
envisioning of Chaos at the outset of Haydn's Creation, aligned
with Herder's efforts to come to an understanding of logos at the
origin of thought. The improvisatory is at the heart of a chapter
on Beethoven's brazen cadenzas for the Concerto in D minor by
Mozart, another ghost in Beethoven's machine.
Music seductively unfinished is the topic of other chapters: on
some unstudied late sketches, finally rejected, for a famous
quartet movement by Beethoven; on the enigmas set loose in several
remarkable Mozart fragments; and on the romanticizing of fragment
and its bearing on two important sonatas that Schubert left
incomplete. In a final coming to terms with the imponderables of
musical intuition, the author returns to Benjamin'sepigraph,
drawing together his foundational essay on Goethe's Elective
Affinities with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and with a draft for
a famous passage in the andantino of Schubert's Sonata in A (1828).
Unfinished Music explores with subtle insight the uneasy
relationship between the finished work and the elusive, provocative
traces of the profound labors buried in its past. The book will
have broad appeal to the community of music scholars, theorists and
performers, and to all those for whom music is integral to the
history of ideas.
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