Brings together in one volume the full text of some 450 letters in first-time English translation, organized into sections each prefaced by an introduction. All the letters are fully annotated and they yield information about Viennese society, culture and politics of the time. The work of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), widely regarded as the most important music theorist of the twentieth century, has shaped the teaching of music theory in the United States profoundly and influenced theorists there, in Europe, and throughout the world. Living and working in Vienna, Schenker maintained a vigorous correspondence with a large circle of professional musicians, writers, music critics, institutions, administrators, patrons, friends, and pupils. A large part of his correspondence was preserved after his death: some 7,000 letters, postcards, telegrams, etc., to and from 400 correspondents. His diaries record the fabric of his personal life and his activities asa private music teacher and writer; they also provide a detailed commentary on historical and political events and offer a window on to the conditions of life in Vienna. Taken together, these documents contribute vividly to the picture of cultural life in Vienna, and elsewhere, from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual and his circle of musical and artistic friends. Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence represents a concise edition ofsome of the theorist's most important and revelatory letters and diary entries. It offers the full text of some 450 letters in English translation, organized into sections devoted to various aspects of his professional life: teaching, writing, administration, and maintaining contact with an ever widening circle including Ferruccio Busoni, Julius Roentgen, Otto Erich Deutsch, Alphons von Rothschild, Paul von Klenau, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, MorizViolin, John Petrie Dunn, and Hans Weisse. Extracts from the diaries provide a summary of important parts of the correspondence that do not survive. The volume includes a detailed exposition of the editorial method, biographicalnotes on correspondents, and a substantial general introduction. Each of the sections is prefaced by an introduction which provides essential historical context, and the letters and diary entries are fully annotated. IAN BENT is Emeritus Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, and lives in the United Kingdom. DAVID BRETHERTON is Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton. WILLIAM DRABKIN is Professorof Music at the University of Southampton. CONTRIBUTORS: Marko Deisinger, Martin Eybl, Christoph Hust, Kevin C. Karnes, John Koslovsky, Lee Rothfarb, John Rothgeb, Hedi Siegel, Arnold Whittall

Twelve authors probe the mind of the Romantic era in its thinking about music. They provide a searching examination of writings by music theorists, critics, aestheticians, philosophers, and commentators from 1800 to 1875. In doing so, they wield new critical tools as well as old, casting fresh light, for example, on familiar problems of musical form by inspecting eighteenth-century rhetoric and nineteenth-century gendered discourse; exploring Schubertian modulation and Wagnerian motif with the insights of cognitive science; reinterpreting pianistic finger exercise by way of Michel Foucault and Frankenstein and so on. The impact of Hegel and Schelling on music theory occupies an important place, as does Schleiermacher's hermeneutics on analysis and criticism. The brilliant group of young historians of theory, represented here, provides an array of approaches, from detailed music analysis, through close reading of texts, through critical discourse, to philosophical enquiry.

In this second volume of nineteenth-century music analyses, Ian Bent provides a further selection of newly translated writings of nineteenth-century music critics and theorists, including composers such as Wagner, Schumann and Berlioz, and critics such as A. B. Marx and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Where Volume I, on Fugue, Form and Style, presented nineteen analyses of a technical nature, all the writing here involves a metaphorical style of verbalised description, some pure examples, and others hybrid forms mixed with technical analysis. The music analysed is amongst the best-known in the repertoire: Wagner writes on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Fifth, Schumann writes on Berlioz, and Berlioz on Meyerbeer. Professor Bent presents each analysis with its own detailed introduction and each is amplified by supporting information in footnotes.

This is the first intellectual biography of the French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau synthesised the vocabulary and grammar of musical practice into a concise scientific system, earning himself the popular title of 'Newton of the Arts'. Ranging widely over the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century, Thomas Christensen is able to orient Rameau's accomplishments in the light of speculative and practical considerations of music theory as well as many of the scientific ideas current in the French Enlightenment. He shows how Rameau incorporates ideas ranging from neoplatonic thought and Cartesian mechanistic metaphysics to Locke's empirical psychology and Newtonian experimental science. Additional primary documents help clarify Rameau's fascinating and stormy relationship with the Encyclopedists, Diderot, Rousseau and d'Alembert.

This book demonstrates, in fascinating diversity, how musicians in the nineteenth century thought about and described music. The analysis of music took many forms (verbal, diagrammatic, tabular, notational, graphic), was pursued for many different purposes (educational, scholarly, theoretical, promotional) and embodied very different approaches. This, the first volume, is concerned with writing on fugue, form and questions of style in the music of Palestrina, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner and presents analyses of complete works or movements by the most significant theorists and critics of the century. The analyses are newly translated into English and are introduced and thoroughly annotated by Ian Bent, making this a volume of enormous importance to our understanding of the nature of music reception in the nineteenth century.