|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
The first English-language book on Czerny, and the broadest survey
of his activity in any language. Within the history of European
music, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) is simultaneously all too familiar
and virtually invisible. During his lifetime, he was a highly
successful composer of popular piano music, and his pedagogical
works remain fundamental to the training of pianists. But Czerny's
reputation in these areas has obscured the remarkable breadth of
his activity, and especially his work as a composer of serious
music, which recent performances and recordings have shown to hold
real musical interest. Beyond "The Art of Finger Dexterity"
explores Czerny's multifaceted career and its legacy and provides
the first broad assessment of his work as a composer. Prominent
North American and European musicians and scholars explore topics
including Czerny's life and its context; his autobiographical
writings and efforts to promote his teacher, Beethoven; his
activity as a pedagogue, both as teacher of Liszt and as the
authority held up to innumerable amateur women pianists; his role
in shaping performance traditions of classical music; the
development of his image during and after his lifetime; and his
work in genres including the Mass, the symphony, the string
quartet, and the piano fantasy. This is the first English-language
book on Czerny, and the broadest survey of his activity in any
language. Contributors: George Barth, Otto Biba, Attilio Bottegal,
Deanna C. Davis, James Deaville, Ingrid Fuchs, David Gramit, Alice
M. Hanson, Anton Kuerti, Marie Sumner Lott, James Parakilas,
Michael Saffle, Franz A. J. Szabo, Douglas Townsend, and John
Wiebe. DavidGramit [University of Alberta] is the author of
Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German
Musical Culture, 1770-1848.
German and Austrian music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries stands at the heart of the Western musical canon. In this
innovative study of various cultural practices (such as music
journalism and scholarship, singing instruction, and concerts),
David Gramit examines how music became an important part of
middle-class identity. He investigates historical discourses around
such topics as the aesthetic debates over the social significance
of folk music, various comparisons of the musical practices of
ethnic "others" to the German "norm," and the establishment of the
concert as a privileged site of cultural activity.
"Cultivating Music" analyzes the ideologies of German musical
discourse during its formative period. Claiming music's importance
to both social well-being and individual development, proponents of
musical culture sought to secure the status of music as an art
integral to bourgeois life. They believed that "music" referred to
the autonomous musical work, meaningful in and of itself to those
cultivated to experience it properly. The social limits to that
cultivation ensured that boundaries of class, gender, and
educational attainment preserved the privileged status of music
despite (but also by means of) their claims for the "universality"
of their canon. Departing from the traditional focus on individual
musical works, Gramit considers the social history of the practice
of music in Austro-German culture. He examines the origins of the
privileged position of the Western canon in musicological
discourses and argues that we cannot fully understand the role that
canon has played without considering the interests that motivated
its creators.
|
|