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Combines fresh approaches to the life and music of the beloved nineteenth-century composer with the latest and most significant ways of thinking about rhythm, meter, and musical time.Brahms and the Shaping of Time brings together essays by leading music scholars, each of which analyzes the music of Brahms with a particular focus on the music's temporality. The volume reveals numerous ways in which Brahms manipulates such basic elements as rhythm and phrase structure in pieces ranging from the Third Piano Sonata and the Double Concerto to a number of his most important and beloved songs. The first two essays examine aspects of rhythm and meter in Brahms's lieder, recognizing his meaningful deviations from temporal norms. The second two pick up the mantle from William Rothstein's landmark text Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. Rothstein's study focused on the music of other composers, but suggested how a future study might explore the music of Brahms; these essays contribute to such a study while also pivoting the book's focus from vocal to instrumental music. Each of the chapters of the third pair cross-examines and expands our understanding of the hemiola. The concluding trio of essays promotes, through further analysis of individual works, ways of hearing that encourage the reader to breach the confines of the score's metric notation. Together, the essays in this volume offer fresh approaches to the life and music of the beloved nineteenth-century composer and incorporate significant new ways of thinking about rhythm, meter, and musical time. CONTRIBUTORS: Eytan Agmon, Richard Cohn, Harald Krebs, Ryan McClelland, Jan Miyake, Scott Murphy, Samuel Ng, Heather Platt, Frank Samarotto Scott Murphy is professorof music theory at the University of Kansas.
Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds.The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated,and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored melodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Etudes, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, Francois de Medicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANCOIS DE MEDICIS is Professor of Music at the Universite de Montreal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.
The first critical study of the life and distinctive artistic vision of Heinrich Neuhaus, a legendary pianist-pedagogue widely considered one of the leading shapers of the renowned Russian piano tradition.Heinrich Neuhaus (1888-1964) was one of the most charismatic and sought after pianist-pedagogues of the twentieth century, earning a formidable reputation in the West as one of the pillars of Russian pianism through the success ofhis star pupils Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, and his book About the Art of Piano Playing. Maria Razumovskaya's Heinrich Neuhaus: A Life beyond Music is the first critical study of this masterful artist. It explores what went on in his teaching studio but also seeks to understand the vibrant circumstances that underpinned Neuhaus's unique outlook and approach. These circumstances include his formative years of study in Europealongside Karol Szymanowski (his cousin) and the renowned pianist Artur Rubinstein, the turbulence of life during the Russian Civil War, Neuhaus's meteoric rise to fame in Moscow, and his lifelong friendship with the poet Boris Pasternak. Razumovskaya's book draws on previously unseen documents relating to Neuhaus's arrest and imprisonment in the infamous Lubyanka for criticizing the Soviet regime. By revealing how these influences helped form Neuhaus's distinct vision of a performer's subjectivity -- what he called an artist's "e;autopsychography"e; -- the book emphasizes important aesthetic principles and practices that were adopted by creative artists eager to escape the banality and limitations imposed by Socialist Realism. MARIA RAZUMOVSKAYA, a recital pianist and researcher, teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should sayor how?French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences. Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century. Reconstructing the French context for Tommaso Traetta's Italian operas that consciously set out to fuse French and Italian elements, Butler explores Traetta's operas and recreations in Parma of operas and ballets by Jean-Philippe Rameau and other French composers. She shows that Parma's brand of entertainment is one in which Traetta's operas occupy points along a continuum representing a long and rich tradition of adaptation and generic play. Such a reading calls into question the very notion of operatic reform, showing the need for a more flexible conception of a volatile moment in opera's history. The book elucidates the complicated circumstances in which entertainments were created that spoke not only to Parma's multicultural audiences but also to an increasingly cosmopolitan Europe. MARGARET R. BUTLER is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Reveals how Aaron Copland's complex relationship with the music of Gustav Mahler shaped his vision for American music in the twentieth century.The iconic American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is often credited with creating an unmistakably American musical style, a style free from the powerful sway of the European classics that long dominated the art-music scene inthe United States. Yet Copland was strongly attracted to the music of the late-romantic Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), whose monumental symphonies and powerful songs have captivated and challenged American audiencesfor more than a century. Drawing extensively on archival and musical materials, Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler offers the first detailed exploration of Copland's multifaceted relationshipwith Mahler's music and its lasting consequences for music in America. Matthew Mugmon demonstrates that Copland, inspired by Mahler's example, blended modernism and romanticism in shaping a vision for American music in the twentieth century, and that he did so through his multiple roles as composer, teacher, critic, and orchestral tastemaker. Copland's career-long engagement with Mahler's music, as Mugmon compellingly illustrates, intersected with Copland's own Jewish identity and with his links to such towering figures in American music as Nadia Boulanger, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. MATTHEW MUGMON is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Arizona.
Bold new essays demonstrate how Leonard Bernstein influenced American culture, society, and politics through his conducting, composing, political relationships, and activism.Composer, conductor, activist, and icon of twentieth-century America, Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) had a rich association with Washington, DC. Although he never lived there, the US capital was the site of some of the most importantmoments in his life and work, as he engaged with the nation's struggles and triumphs. By examining Bernstein through the lens of Washington, DC, this book offers new insights into his life and music from the 1940s through the 1980s, including his role in building the city's artistic landscape, his political-diplomatic aims, his works that received premieres and other early performances in Washington, and his relationships with the nation's liberal and conservative political elites. The collection also contributes new perspectives on twentieth-century American history, government, and culture, helping to elucidate the political function of music in American democracy. The essays in Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DC, all newly written by leading authorities, situate this important American cultural figure in the seat of United States government. The result is a fresh new angle on Leonard Bernstein, American politics, and American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Daniel Abraham is Professor of Music at American University, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk is Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University, and Andrew H. Weaver is Professor of Musicology at The Catholic University of America.
A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.In the annals of music history, few figures have dominated the discussion of virtuosity as much as Franz Liszt. A flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement andan icon whose star power radiated far beyond the realm of music, Liszt was, along with his early model, Paganini, among the first major performer-composers to define himself principally by virtuosity. Featuring new essays by an international group of preeminent scholars, Liszt and Virtuosity offers a reevaluation of the concept and practices of virtuosity as shaped and defined in Liszt's multifaceted oeuvre, as well as a reconsiderationof Liszt's relation to other major and lesser-known musical figures, including Czerny, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and Marie Jaell. Set in the context of larger trends within the fields of music history, musicanalysis, intellectual history, and performance studies, these capacious explorations demonstrate that Liszt's uniqueness and significance resided in his ability to transform virtuosity into a revolutionary musical force, pushingthe piano aesthetic to the limits of sound and poetic meaning.
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