Expressive Intersections in Brahms

Expressive Intersections in Brahms

Author: Heather Platt

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2012-07-18

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0253005256

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“This exceptionally fine collection brings together many of the best analysts of Brahms, and nineteenth-century music generally, in the English-speaking world today.” —Nineteenth-Century Music Review Contributors to this exciting volume examine the intersection of structure and meaning in Brahms’s music, utilizing a wide range of approaches, from the theories of Schenker to the most recent analytical techniques. They combine various viewpoints with the semiotic-based approaches of Robert Hatten, and address many of the most important genres in which Brahms composed. The essays reveal the expressive power of a work through the comparison of specific passages in one piece to similar works and through other artistic realms such as literature and painting. The result of this intertextual re-framing is a new awareness of the meaningfulness of even Brahms’s most “absolute” works. “Through its unique combination of historical narrative, expressive content, and technical analytical approaches, the essays in Expressive Intersections in Brahms will have a profound impact on the current scholarly discourse surrounding Brahms analysis.” —Notes


Book Synopsis Expressive Intersections in Brahms by : Heather Platt

Download or read book Expressive Intersections in Brahms written by Heather Platt and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This exceptionally fine collection brings together many of the best analysts of Brahms, and nineteenth-century music generally, in the English-speaking world today.” —Nineteenth-Century Music Review Contributors to this exciting volume examine the intersection of structure and meaning in Brahms’s music, utilizing a wide range of approaches, from the theories of Schenker to the most recent analytical techniques. They combine various viewpoints with the semiotic-based approaches of Robert Hatten, and address many of the most important genres in which Brahms composed. The essays reveal the expressive power of a work through the comparison of specific passages in one piece to similar works and through other artistic realms such as literature and painting. The result of this intertextual re-framing is a new awareness of the meaningfulness of even Brahms’s most “absolute” works. “Through its unique combination of historical narrative, expressive content, and technical analytical approaches, the essays in Expressive Intersections in Brahms will have a profound impact on the current scholarly discourse surrounding Brahms analysis.” —Notes

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

Author: Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-05-24

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0253033160

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Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.


Book Synopsis Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music by : Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes

Download or read book Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music written by Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

Brahms Among Friends

Brahms Among Friends

Author: Paul Berry

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-04

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0199982643

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Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.


Book Synopsis Brahms Among Friends by : Paul Berry

Download or read book Brahms Among Friends written by Paul Berry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.

Rethinking Brahms

Rethinking Brahms

Author: Nicole Grimes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 0197541739

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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 number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.


Book Synopsis Rethinking Brahms by : Nicole Grimes

Download or read book Rethinking Brahms written by Nicole Grimes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.

Brahms's Elegies

Brahms's Elegies

Author: Nicole Grimes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1108661130

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Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.


Book Synopsis Brahms's Elegies by : Nicole Grimes

Download or read book Brahms's Elegies written by Nicole Grimes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall

Author: Katy Hamilton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1107042704

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This collection explores the boundaries between Brahms' professional identity and his lifelong engagement with private and amateur music-making.


Book Synopsis Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall by : Katy Hamilton

Download or read book Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall written by Katy Hamilton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the boundaries between Brahms' professional identity and his lifelong engagement with private and amateur music-making.

Brahms and the Shaping of Time

Brahms and the Shaping of Time

Author: Scott Murphy

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1580465978

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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.


Book Synopsis Brahms and the Shaping of Time by : Scott Murphy

Download or read book Brahms and the Shaping of Time written by Scott Murphy and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Sonata Fragments

Sonata Fragments

Author: Andrew Davis

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-08-21

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0253025451

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“An effort to expand sonata theory more solidly into the nineteenth-century repertoire.” —Notes In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic. “A major achievement.” —Michael L. Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject


Book Synopsis Sonata Fragments by : Andrew Davis

Download or read book Sonata Fragments written by Andrew Davis and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An effort to expand sonata theory more solidly into the nineteenth-century repertoire.” —Notes In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic. “A major achievement.” —Michael L. Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject

Focal Impulse Theory

Focal Impulse Theory

Author: John Paul Ito

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0253049946

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Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the dance of the performer's body, and you change the dance of the notes. As Focal Impulse Theory deftly illustrates, bodily movements carry musical meaning and, in a very real sense, are meaning.


Book Synopsis Focal Impulse Theory by : John Paul Ito

Download or read book Focal Impulse Theory written by John Paul Ito and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the dance of the performer's body, and you change the dance of the notes. As Focal Impulse Theory deftly illustrates, bodily movements carry musical meaning and, in a very real sense, are meaning.

Liszt and Virtuosity

Liszt and Virtuosity

Author: Robert Doran

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1580469396

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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.


Book Synopsis Liszt and Virtuosity by : Robert Doran

Download or read book Liszt and Virtuosity written by Robert Doran and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.