Over the course of an astonishingly long career, Elliott Carter has engaged with many musical developments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries - from his early neo-classic music of the interwar period, to his modernist works of conflict and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the reshaping of a modernist aesthetic in his latest compositions. Elliott Carter Studies throws new light on these many facets of Carter's extensive musical oeuvre. This collection of essays presents historic, philosophic, philological and theoretical points of departure for in-depth investigations of individual compositions, stylistic periods in Carter's output and his contributions to a variety of genres, including vocal music, the string quartet and the concerto. The first multi-authored book to appear on Carter's music, it brings together research from a distinguished team of leading international Carter scholars, providing the reader with a wide range of perspectives on an extraordinary
Even as Georg Philipp Telemann's significance within eighteenth-century musical culture has become more widely appreciated in recent years, the English-language literature on his life and music has remained limited. This volume, bringing together sixteen essays by leading scholars from the USA, Germany, and Japan, helps to redress this imbalance as it signals a more international engagement with Telemann's legacy. The composer appears here not only as an important early Enlightenment figure, but also as a postmodern one. Chapters on his sacred music address the works' sensitivity to Lutheran and physico-theology, contrasting of historical and modern consciousness, and embodiment of an emerging opus concept. His secular compositions and writings are brought into rich dialogue with French musical and aesthetic currents. Also considered are Telemann's relationships with contemporaries such as Johann Sebastian Bach, the urban and courtly contexts for his music, and his influential
The life and works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy are enjoying a considerable resurgence of interest. This volume presents the most recent trends in Mendelssohn research, covering three broad categories - reception history, historical and critical essays, and case studies of particular compositions. Much of the book depends on a wealth of primary nineteenth-century documents, including little-known autograph manuscripts, letters, and sketches of the composer. Four studies consider various facets of Mendelssohn reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Friedhelm Krummacher considers the abiding popularity of Mendelssohn's music in England, while Peter Ward Jones reviews Mendelssohn's business dealings with English publishers; Donald Mintz examines the composer's posthumous reputation from the perspective of the revolutionary agenda of mid-nineteenth-century Germany; and Lawrence Kramer considers dynamic multiple layers of meaning in the Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
Michael Tippett (1905–98) was one of the major figures of British music in this century. This volume of essays provides the first substantial writing on the composer for over a decade and includes the work of established scholars as well as several new voices. Essays encompass a range of genres and style periods, but a number of recurring themes may be detected. Broadly speaking, the book moves between technical discussion focused on individual works and wider questions of context - the 'external' factors that shaped the composer's musical production such as his relationship to the past, his fascination with ancient Greece and his pursuit of the transcendent. What emerges from this book is a rich portrait of a composer whose work reflects the century's triumphs and tragedies with particular intensity and who, at the end of his composing career, was increasingly acknowledged by younger composers as a major influence and example.
This book, first published in 2001, presents a portrait of Jean Sibelius as composer and man, a figure of national and international significance, patriot, husband and father. Three introductory articles explore Sibelius's reception in Finland, performance practice and recording history, and Sibelius's aesthetic position with regard to modernity. The second group of essays examines issues of ideology, sexuality and mythology, and their relationship to musical structure and compositional genesis. Studies of the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies are presented in the concluding section. Collectively, these articles address historical, theoretical and analytical issues in Sibelius's most important works. The analyses are supported by investigations of Sibelius's compositional process as documented by the manuscripts and sketches primarily in the Sibelius Collection of the Helsinki University Library. Exploring Sibelius's innovative approach to tonality, form and texture, the
This symposium celebrates the 450th anniversary of the birth of William Byrd, one of the greatest English composers. Twelve scholars contribute essays which together cover all the genres of Byrd's prolific output. Topics discussed in this collection include authentication of the canon, applications of technology to Byrd research, Byrd's relationship to earlier English traditions and his influence on his successors. There are studies concerned with manuscript sources and aspects of performance and the final contribution is a comprehensive listing of Byrd recordings made between 1923 and 1988. The essays in this volume show a variety of approaches to musical analysis and some of the conclusions are controversial, or offer revisions of earlier opinions.
Mahler Studies comprises ten innovative essays on topics spanning the range of Mahler research. Blaukopf's inquiry into critical influences on Mahler's student years provides background for Reilly's reassessment of sources for 'Opus 1', Das klagende Lied. McClatchie introduces Mahler's previously inaccessible correspondence with family members, while Feder presents insightful psychoanalytic perspectives on Mahler's relationships to his sister Justine and other women in his life before Alma. Mitchell and La Grange explore the complex issue of quotation and allusion in Mahler's oeuvre. The long-restricted Seventh Symphony sketchbook provides detailed glimpses of that Mahlerian 'world' emerging in its earliest stages, as documented by Hefling. Issues of tonal structure and coherence are addressed by Agawu and Williamson, while Franklin on Adorno's Mahler provides a clear explication of that author's dialectic engagement with the composer.
This volume contains nine substantial essays by the world's leading Berlioz scholars. They cover various aspects of Berlioz's life and works and represent an important contribution to Berlioz research. The book includes essays based on documents, both biographical and musical, that give us, among other things, a portrait of the artist as a young man and a revealing view of an important but little-studied work of his maturity. There are readings of Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust that wrestle anew with the problems of the relationships between literature and music and - as Berlioz's music nearly always requires - with the problems of genre. Two views of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été are presented which ask when and why the work was conceived, and how the work coheres. The practical question of Berlioz's metronome marks are here thoroughly studied for the first time. The volume closes with a novel piece, in dialogue form, by the elder statesman of Berlioz scholars, Jacques Barzu
This second volume of essays in Chopin Studies contains Chopin research by twelve leading scholars. Three main topics are addressed: reception history, aesthetics and criticism, and performance studies. The first four chapters investigate certain images associated with Chopin during his lifetime and after his death: Chopin as classical composer, as salon composer, as modernist, as 'otherwordly', as androgyne. The next four essays contextualize and define aspects of his musical language, including narrative stuctures, baroque affinities, progressive tendencies and functional ambiguity. The last four deal with analysis and source study as related to performance, structure and expression, tempo rubato and 'authentic' interpretation. The book ends with a thumbnail sketch of Chopin as revealed in a recently discovered diary for 1847–8.
The tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death fell in 1995, and this 1995 volume of specially commissioned essays was collected to celebrate Purcell's music in his tercentenary year. The essays are representative of the best research and deal mainly with the autograph manuscripts, Purcell's compositional technique, the relationship between Purcell and his teacher John Blow, a reassessment of Purcell court odes, performance practice and wordsetting, and eighteenth-century reception history, particularly regarding King Arthur. The volume is well illustrated with music examples and photographs of important manuscripts. It also analyses Purcell's compositional techniques through detailed study of his manuscripts and reports on the discovery of two important autograph manuscripts. The book opens with an assessment of Purcell's illusive personality.
This book is the first major publication devoted to the music of Janácek, now widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the early twentieth century. The essays, all by leading scholars, deal with a broad range of subjects relating to opera, symphonic poem, instrumental music, cultural context and reception. Some topics, such as the sources of Janácek's musical expressivity, questions of narrative, Janácek as musical analyst and Janácek as realist, are considered seriously for the first time, whilst other more conventional topics, such as 'speech melody' and Janácek's ethnographic activities, are reappraised. A transcription of Janácek's analytical study of 'Jeux de vagues' from Debussy's La mer is published for the first time, and this document is considered in the light of Janácek's theory of music as a whole and of the reception of La mer.
Few composers' posthumous reputations have grown as steadily as Shostakovich's. Yet outside the concert hall the focus of attention seems to have been on the extraordinary circumstances of his life rather than on the music itself. This book seeks to show that the power of his work stems as much from its craftsmanship as from its political and personal context. The theoretical chapters lay the foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language for the first time in the West. The social context is not neglected, however, and alongside many new insights spread through the book, a substantial and provocative chapter considers the issues surrounding the composition of the Fifth Symphony. The eleven essays in the volume draw together some of the finest scholars of Russian music in Europe, Russia and America.
The second volume of studies based on the work of Heinrich Schenker, now recognised as the twenty-first century's most influential figure in the areas of music theory and analysis. The first section of the book contains three archival studies that derive from the contents of Schenker's Nachlass, recently made available to scholars. Schenker's unpublished papers also supplement several of the analytical studies in the second, larger section of the book. Eleven essays fall into four groups: studies in the Classic and Romantic repertory, studies in twentieth-century music, rhythmic studies and studies in the theory of Schenker's fundamental analytical constructs, the Urline and the Ursatz.
The advances in Haydn scholarship would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, who honoured the composer more in word than in deed. Haydn Studies deals with many aspects of a composer who is perennially fresh, concentrating principally on matters of reception, style and aesthetics and presenting many interesting readings of the composer's work. Haydn has never played a major role in accounts of cultural history and has never achieved the emblematic status accorded to composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Stravinsky, in spite of his radical creative agenda: this volume broadens the base of our understanding of the composer.
Ernest Bloch left his native Switzerland to settle in the United States in 1916. One of the great twentieth-century composers, he was influenced by a range of genres and styles - Jewish, American and Swiss - and his works reflect his lifelong struggle with his identity. Drawing on firsthand recollections of relatives and others who knew and worked with the composer, this collection is the most comprehensive study to date of Bloch's life, musical achievement and reception. Contributors present the latest research on Bloch's works and compositional practice, including studies of his Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service), violin pieces such as Nigun, the symphonic Schelomo, and the opera Macbeth. Setting the quality and significance of Bloch's output in its historical and cultural contexts, this book provides scholarly analyses as well as a full chronology, list of online resources, catalogue of published and unpublished works, and selected further reading.
The Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan is one of the major figures of contemporary music, with a world-wide reputation for his modernist engagement with religious images and stories. Beginning with a substantial foreword from the composer himself, this collection of scholarly essays offers analytical, musicological, and theological perspectives on a selection of MacMillan's musical works. The volume includes a study of embodiment in MacMillan's music; a theological study of his St Luke Passion; an examination of the importance of lament in a selection of his works; a chapter on the centrality of musical borrowing to MacMillan's practice; a discussion of his liturgical music; and detailed analyses of other works including The World's Ransoming and the seminal Seven Last Words from the Cross. The chapters provide fresh insights on MacMillan's musical world, his compositional practice, and his relationship to modernity.
Pierre Boulez is acknowledged as one of the most important composers in contemporary musical life. This collection explores his works, influence, reception and legacy, shedding new light on Boulez's music and its historical and cultural contexts. In two sections that focus firstly on the context of the 1940s and 1950s, and secondly on the development of the composer's style, the contributors address recurring themes such as Boulez's approach to the serial principle and the related issues of form and large-scale structure. Featuring excerpts from Boulez's correspondence with a range of his contemporaries here published for the first time, the book illuminates both Boulez's relationship with them and his thinking concerning the challenges which confronted both him and other leading figures of the European avant-garde. In the final section, three chapters examine Boulez's relationship with audiences in the United Kingdom, and the development of the appreciation of his music.
Did you know that Beethoven contemplated, however fleetingly, writing more than forty symphonies and that for the Missa solemnis he sought stimulus from a Latin-German dictionary? And what about the underappreciated sociable side of Beethoven's music to set alongside the familiar one of the heroic? Beethoven Studies 4 is a collection of ten chapters that approach the composer and his music from an appealing range of critical standpoints, aesthetic, analytical, biographical, historical and performance. Alongside essays that offer new information on Beethoven's compositional practice and broaden understanding of the music's contemporary and posthumous appeal, there are essays on his interaction with specific environments, Bonn and post-Napoleonic Austria, and vocal and piano performance practice. The volume will appeal to cultural historians and practitioners as well as Beethoven enthusiasts.
Thomas Adès is a dominant force in contemporary music, whose work attracts significant attention and acclaim, and has been performed by many renowned ensembles. This volume – the first to present a range of scholarly essays on every aspect of Adès's music – offers authoritative accounts of Adès's major compositions from a variety of analytical, critical, cultural and historical perspectives. The opening chapters focus on Adès's earlier music, offering close readings of key works. Further essays focus on his engagement with forms and instrumental genres. The final chapters turn to Adès's texted music and highlight how themes introduced in earlier chapters cut across Adès's entire output. Richly illustrated with musical examples and supported by further online material, this book provides a multi-faceted portrait of Adès's work that opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging with, his music.
Since the 1980s, when she re-emerged from the peripheries into a more central position in music studies, Clara Schumann (1819–1896) has exerted an enduring fascination over the scholarly and popular imagination. Revisionist biographies, the uncovering of primary sources (diaries, letters, memorabilia), and filmic and literary depictions of Schumann have all brought into sharper focus the details and reception of her life, while simultaneously drawing attention to how much there is still to learn about her creativity. This book brings together a team of leading scholars to reappraise Clara Schumann in three particular respects: first, by delving deeper into her social and musical contexts; secondly, by offering fresh analytical perspectives on her songs and instrumental music; and thirdly, by reconsidering her legacy as a pianist and teacher. In doing so, the volume not only contributes to a rounded picture of Schumann's creative vision, but also opens up new pathways in the wider
