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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.
Chemometric Techniques for Quantitative Analysis shows how to
produce and use quantitative analytical calibrations in a
laboratory or production environment following a variety of
methods, how to estimate the time and resources needed to develop
analytical calibrations, and how to employ the quantitative
software provided with a wide range of instruments and commercial
software packages. Among several, this bestselling volume covers
basic and classical approaches, component regression; PCR in
action; partial least squares; PLS in action. An extensive appendix
offers a glossary, a list of errors and tests for reduced
Eigenvalues.
Chemometric Techniques for Quantitative Analysis shows how to
produce and use quantitative analytical calibrations in a
laboratory or production environment following a variety of
methods, how to estimate the time and resources needed to develop
analytical calibrations, and how to employ the quantitative
software provided with a wide range of instruments and commercial
software packages. Among several, this bestselling volume covers
basic and classical approaches, component regression; PCR in
action; partial least squares; PLS in action. An extensive appendix
offers a glossary, a list of errors and tests for reduced
Eigenvalues.
Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815
through to the final months of their lives, when each were
increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough
inspire notions of "late style." Here is Vienna, hosting a congress
in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the
European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of
its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political
environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the
midst of his most prolific year-some 140 songs, four operas, and
much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife
crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two
strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas
for the "Hammerklavier," opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer's
compelling reading, each seemed to be composing
"against"-Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against
the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical
imagination took full flight. From the Ruins of Enlightenment
begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects:
Schubert's settings of the poems of Ludwig Hoelty in a fragmentary
cycle and Beethoven's engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann
Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected
resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in
their "lonely and singular journeys" through the "rich solitude of
their music."
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.
Author Richard Kramer moves from some explosive ideas of J. G.
Hamann, on the place of language at the seat of thought, to explore
the no less radical music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose bold
idiosyncrasies, like Hamann's, disrupted the discourse of
Enlightenment aesthetics. In several chapters on the late music of
Beethoven, Bach reappears, a spiritual alter ego in the search for
a new voice. Music seductively unfinished lies at the center of the
book: unstudied late sketches, finally rejected, for a famous
quartet movement by Beethoven; the enigmas set loose in several
remarkable Mozart fragments; the romanticizing of fragment and its
bearing on two important sonatas that Schubert left incomplete.
Finally, the author returns to Benjamin's epigraph, drawing
together his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, Mann's Death in
Venice, and the draft for a difficult 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
appeal to music scholars, theorists and performers, indeed to all
for whom music is integral to the history of ideas.
Franz Schubert's song cycles "Schone Mullerin" and "Winterreise"
are cornerstones of the genre. But as Richard Kramer argues in this
book, Schubert envisioned many other songs as components of
cyclical arrangements that were never published as such. By
carefully studying Schubert's original manuscripts, Kramer recovers
some of these "distant cycles" and accounts for idiosyncrasies in
the songs which other analyses have failed to explain.
Returning the songs to their original keys, Kramer reveals linkages
among songs which were often obscured as Schubert readied his
compositions for publication. His analysis thus conveys even
familiar songs in fresh contexts that will affect performance,
interpretation, and criticism. After addressing problems of
multiple settings and revisions, Kramer presents a series of briefs
for the reconfiguring of sets of songs to poems by Goethe,
Rellstab, and Heine. He deconstructs "Winterreise," using its
convoluted origins to illuminate its textual contradictions.
Finally, Kramer scrutinizes settings from the "Abendrote" cycle (on
poems by Friedrich Schlegel) for signs of cyclic process. Probing
the farthest reaches of Schubert's engagement with the poetics of
lieder, "Distant Cycles" exposes tensions between Schubert the
composer and Schubert the merchant-entrepreneur.
For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the
moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's
imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered,
it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work,
the blink of an eye in which one's world changes. In Cherubino's
Leap, Richard Kramer unmasks such prismatic moments in a range of
iconic instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; in
the musical engagement with the formidable odes of Friedrich
Klopstock; and, on the grand stage of opera, at the intense moment
of recognition in Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride and the exquisitely
introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino's daring escape in
Mozart's Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze
in Mozart's Entf hrung inspire a reflection on the tragic aspect of
the composer's operatic women. Other players from literature and
the arts Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them enrich the landscape
of this journey through the Enlightenment imagination.
This is a learning book about the alphabet written as a poem. It
emphasizes each letter of the alphabet in the sentences.
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