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This indispensable handbook explains how scholars and students should work with and think about the composer's working manuscripts.
This book examines the impact place and displacement can have on the composition and interpretation of Western art music, using as its primary objects of study the work of István Anhalt (1919–2012), György Kurtág (1926–), and Sándor Veress (1907–92). Although all three composers are of Hungarian origin, their careers followed radically different paths. Whereas, Kurtág remained in Budapest for most of his career, Anhalt and Veress left: the former in 1946 and immigrated to Canada and the latter in 1948 and settled in Switzerland. All three composers have had an extraordinary impact in the cultural environments within which their work took place. In the first section, “Place and D...
After the Rite: Stravinsky's Path to Neoclassicism (1914-1925) traces the evolution of Stravinsky's compositional style as he searched for his own voice in the explosive musical world of the early 20th century as he responded to harsh criticisms of his work.
Yet, from the perspective of his later works, the static and discontinuous depictions of Stravinsky's music seem incomplete and perhaps even simplistic. The "building blocks" of his novel textures often consist of tunes with identifiable intervallic shapes, goal pitches, and defining durational patterns-organizations that engender continuity and connection. In other words, although its basic materials are combined into new, often dissonant and usually repetitive textures, those materials still originate in, and depend upon, traditional concepts of melody, harmony, and pulsation. Presenting an innovative analytical model for Stravinsky's compositions, Building Blocks seeks a fuller perspective, and enables a fresh, insightful approach to this music and the theoretical constructs behind it.
As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a numbe...
Ferruccio Busoni's conception of the musical work derives from his multiple roles as performer, aesthetician, editor, composer, arranger, and intellectual. Drawing on unpublished scores, manuscripts, sketches and documents from the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, concert programs from a private collection in Berkeley, acoustic recordings, information about Busoni's intellectual interests gleaned from an auction catalogue featuring the contents of his extensive library, and the published aesthetic writings, letters, and compositions, the present study offers the first comprehensive account of Busoni's work concept. By establishing connections between his ideas and his musical practice, it explores and clarifies the reasoning behind his idiosyncratic compositional style, a style characterized by a blurring of boundaries between original and borrowed material. Polystylistic mixtures of the old and new and a distinctive performance style, in which Busoni creatively altered and embellished existing texts, exemplify his practice in an age in thrall to Werktreue, when originality of idea was prized above all else.
A unique insight into the relationship between Brahms's music and his philosophical and literary context from a modernist perspective.
The symphony has long been entangled with ideas of self and value. Though standard historical accounts suggest that composers' interest in the symphony was almost extinguished in the early 1930s, this book makes plain the genre's continued cultural dominance, and argues that the symphony can illuminate issues around space/geography, race, and postcolonialism in Germany, France, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on a number of symphonies composed or premiered in 1933, this book recreates some of the cultural and political landscapes of an uncertain historical moment-a year when Hitler took power in Germany, and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination asks what North American and European symphonies from the early 1930s can tell us about how people imagined selfhood during a period of international insecurity and political upheaval, of expansionist and colonial fantasies, scientised racism, and emergent fascism.
This new collection views Russian music through the Greek triad of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” to investigate how the idea of "nation" embeds itself in the public discourse about music and other arts with results at times invigorating, at times corrupting. In our divided, post–Cold War, and now post–9/11 world, Russian music, formerly a quiet corner on the margins of musicology, has become a site of noisy contention. Richard Taruskin assesses the political and cultural stakes that attach to it in the era of Pussy Riot and renewed international tensions, before turning to individual cases from the nineteenth century to the present. Much of the volume is devoted to the reso...
Alberto Ginastera: A Research and Information Guide is the first bio-bibliographic study of the composer and the only published book on the subject in English. This work fills a critical gap in contemporary music studies by enriching our knowledge of one of the most compelling creative voices of the Americas. Given the lack of prior systematic attention to Ginastera, this book establishes a firm foundation for future scholarship. It includes a detailed biographical sketch of the composer that quotes extensively from his letters. It summarizes the defining features of his style and encompasses his infrequently explored late works. It offers the most comprehensive catalogue of Ginastera’s music to date and provides an annotated list of his published writings. This book contains over 400 annotated bibliographic entries that refer to critically selected sources in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The last chapter offers new information about archival holdings and internet resources that facilitates research on this composer. An appendix featuring a detailed chronology of Ginastera’s career completes this work.