You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Schubert did not emerge a...
Music at German Courts serves to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of eighteenth-century German court music establishments without losing sight of what these Kapellen had in common. What was musical life at German courts really like during the eighteenth century? Were musical ensembles as diverse as the Holy Roman Empire's kaleidoscopic political landscape? Through a series of individual case studies contributed by leading scholars from Germany, Poland, the United States, Canada, and Australia, this book investigates the realities of musical life at fifteen German courts of varied size (ranging from kingdoms to principalities), religious denomination, and geographical location. Signific...
The subject of transnational lives has only recently gained importance in historical research. With its transnational approach to “mobility and biography,” this volume brings together research on aspects of mobility and biography across different times and spaces to open up new interdisciplinary perspectives. Networks, movements and the capacity to become socially or spatially mobile in and across Europe are not only analysed as structural factors, but rather seen as connected to concrete practices of mobility among different groups in the spheres of business, politics and the arts: from Jewish merchants via legal and financial advisors all the way to musicians.
Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory precisely because their respective disciplines think so differently. Dark Matter argues that what makes their contributions to the Frankfurt School so remarkable is how they think together in spite of these differences. Kluge and Negt's "gravitational thinking" balances not only the abstractions of theory with the concreteness of the aesthetic, but also their allegiances to Frankfurt School mentors with their fascination for other German, French, and Anglo-American thinkers distinctly outside the ...
This study of Franz Schubert's settings of poetry by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis introduces the fascinating world of early German Romanticism in the 1790s, when an energetic group of bold young thinkers radically changed the landscape of European thought. Schubert's encounters with early Romantic poetry some twenty years later reanimated some of the movement's central ideas. Schubert set eleven texts from Schlegel's Abendröte poetic cycle and six poems drawn from Novalis' religious and erotic poetry. Through detailed analyses of how various musical structures in these songs mirror and sometimes even explicate the central ideas of the poems, this book argues that Schubert was an abstract ...
The New Bruckner provides a valuable study of Bruckner's music, focusing on the interaction of biography, textual scholarship, reception history and analysis. Dr Dermot Gault conveys a broad chronological narrative of Bruckner's compositional development, interpolating analytical commentaries on the works and critical accounts of the notoriously complex and editorial issues. Gault corrects longstanding misconceptions about the composer's revision process, and its relationship with the early editions and widely-held critical opinions. Bruckner's constantly evolving engagement with symphonic form is traced by taking each revision in due order, rather than by taking each symphony on its own, and by relating the symphonies to other mature works such as the Te Deum, the three great Masses, and the Quintet, and argues that Bruckner's music became more organic and less schematic as the result of his revisions. The book will be essential reading for those studying Bruckner's compositions, the complex history of their reception, and late Romantic music in general.
The first edition of Albert R. Rice's The Baroque Clarinet is widely considered the authoritative text on the European clarinet during the first half of the eighteenth century. Since its publication in 1992, its conclusions have influenced the approaches of musicologists, instrument historians, and clarinet performers. Twenty-eight years later, Rice has updated his renowned study in a second edition, with new chapters on chalumeau and clarinet music, insights on newly found instruments and additional material on the Baroque clarinet in society. Expanding the volume to include the chalumeau, close cousin and predecessor to the clarinet, Rice draws on nearly three decades of new research on th...
Reveals how the Holy Roman Empire's cultural networks c. 1800 underpinned the transnational spread of music for the German-language stage.
A fresh analytical and musicological exploration of Schubert's incorporation of lyric elements into sonata form by way of his string quartets.
Unaccountably, Percy Grainger has remained on the margins of both American music history and twentieth-century modernism. This volume reveals the well-known composer of popular gems to be a self-described ’hyper-modernist’ who composed works of uncompromising dissonance, challenged the conventions of folk song collection and adaptation, re-visioned the modern orchestra, experimented with ’ego-less’ composition and designed electronic machines intended to supersede human application. Grainger was far from being a self-sufficient maverick working in isolation. Through contact with innovators such as Ferrucio Busoni, Léon Theremin and Henry Cowell; promotion of the music of modern Fren...