Brahms Studies 2
Edited by David Brodbeck
The eight essays in Brahms Studies 2 provide a rich sampling of contemporary Brahms research. In his examination of editions of Brahms's music, George Bozarth questions the popular notion that most of the composer's music already exists in reliable critical editions. Daniel Beller-McKenna reconsiders the younger Brahms's involvement in musical politics at midcentury. The cantata Rinaldo is the centerpiece of Carol Hess's consideration of Brahms's music as autobiographical statement. Heather Platt's exploration of the twentieth-century reception of Brahms's Lieder reveals that advoactes of Hugo Wolf's aesthetics have shaped the discourse concerning the composer's songs and calls for an approach more clearly based on Brahms's aesthetics.
In his examination of the rise of the "great symphony" as a critical category that carried with it a nearly impossible standard to meet, Walter Frisch provides a rich context in which to understand Brahms's well-known early struggle with the genre. Kenneth Hull suggests that Brahms used ironic allusions to Bach and Beethoven in the tragic Fourth Symphony in order to subvert the enduring assumption that a minor-key symphony will end triumphantly in the major mode. Peter H. Smith examines Brahms's late style by concentrating on Neapolitan tonal relations in the Clarinet Sonata in F Minor. Finally, David Brodbeck delineates the complex evolution of Brahms's reception of Mendelssohn's music. David Brodbeck is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he chairs the Department of Music. He is a former president of the American Brahms Society and the author of Brahms: Symphony No. 1.
December Music
208 pp. 7 x 11
48 musical examples, 6 plates, 6 tables, 2 indexes
$65.00s cloth 0-8032-1287-9 BRAST2
http://nebraskapress.unl.edu
Leonora's Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse
Roger Parker
"Parker's wit and high irony pervade every page. In a sense, his central aim (though never self-identified as such) is to brandish a new `tone' or attitude toward scholarship-and toward Verdi-in the postmodern 1990s. The book is immensely engaging throughout: verbal surprises and astonishing suggestions lurk around every corner. Leonora's Last Act is a joy to read even as it seeks mischievously to unsettle our views of this composer."--James Hepokoski, University of Minnesota
In these essays, Roger Parker brings a series of valuable insights to bear on Verdian analysis and criticism, and does so in a way that responds both to an opera-goer's love of musical drama and to a scholar's concern for recent critical trends. As he writes at one point: "opera challenges us by means of its brash impurity, its loose ends and excess of meaning, its superfluity of narrative secrets." Verdi's works, many of which underwent drastic revisions over the years and which sometimes bore marks of an unusual collaboration between composer and librettist, illustrate in particular why it can sometimes be misleading to assign fixed meanings to an opera. Parker instead explores works like Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La forza del destino, and Falstaff from a variety of angles, and addresses such contentious topics as the composer's involvement with Italian politics, the possibilities of an "authentic" staging of his work, and the advantages and pitfalls of analyzing his operas according to terms that his contemporaries might have understood.
Parker takes into account many of the interdisciplinary influences currently engaging musicologists, in particular narrative and feminist theory. But he also demonstrates that close attention to the documentary evidence-especially that offered by autograph scores-can stimulate equal interpretive activity. This book serves as a model of research and critical thinking about opera, while nevertheless retaining a deep respect for opera's continuing power to touch generations of listeners.
Roger Parker is Professor of Music and Fellow of St. Hugh's College, Oxford. He is the founding coeditor of the Cambridge Opera Journal and the Donizetti Critical Edition, and the author of several books and articles on nineteenth-century Italian opera. He is the coeditor, with Arthur Groos, of Reading Opera (Princeton).
Princeton Studies in Opera
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, Editors
208 pages. 4 halftones 2 line illus. 46 music exs. 6 x 9
0-691-01557-0 Cloth $32.50 US and L20.95 UK and Europe
Contact: Edith Gimm
fax: 609-258-1335
e-mail: edith@pupress.princeton.edu
PUP Web site: http://pup.princeton.edu
A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger's Philosophy of Music
Taylor Aitken Greer
One of this century's most influential musical intellects takes center stage in Taylor Greer's meticulously wrought study of Charles Seeger (1886-1979). Seeger left an indelible mark in the fields of musicology, music criticism, ethnomusicology, and avant-garde musical composition, but until now there has been no extended appreciation and critique of Seeger's work as a whole, nor has an accessible guide to his texts been available.
Exploring the entire corpus of Charles Seeger's writing, A Question of Balance highlights the work of those persons who most influenced him, especially Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, and Ralph Perry. Invited to inaugurate the music department at the University of California's Berkeley campus in 1912, Seeger became keenly aware of his deficiencies in general education and put himself on a rigorous regimen of intellectual development that included studying history, anthropology, political theory, and philosophy. For the remainder of his life his ideas about music heavily influenced the development of ethnomusicology and systematic musicology.
Charles Seeger is perhaps best known as the father of the folksingers Pete, Mike, and Peggy Seeger and as the husband of the innovative American composer Ruth Crawford. This book makes clear that Seeger was an extremely important thinker and educator in his own right. Seeger's intellectual curiosity was as eclectic as it was enthusiastic, and Greer skillfully weaves together the connections Seeger made between music, the humanities, and the sciences. The result is a luminous tapestry depicting Seeger's ideal schemes of musicology. At the same time it reflects the turbulence and vitality in American musical life during the early decades of the century.
"Greer offers the first extended appreciation and critique of Seeger's work taken as a whole. A superior work [that] will profoundly shape our understanding of a major figure in American music."--Joseph Straus, author of The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger
"Taylor Greer has taken Charles Seeger's fragmented philosophy and theory of music and made it whole, in beautifully concise and lucid prose."--Severine Neff, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Taylor Aiken Greer is Associate Professor of Music at Pennsylvania State University
December
(122) 0-520-21152-9
$55.00x cloth
278 pages, 6 x 9", 22 line figures, 13 musical examples
Music
World
The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy
Lydia Goehr
What is musical meaning? Where does it reside and how can it be known? Does it make a difference to its meaning if the music is composed with or without words, as a symphony or a song? Why is it claimed that music can express human feelings with an immediacy not possible in other languages or arts? What is contained in the claim that music is autonomous, or that it is prophetic and can articulate a 'politics for the future'? Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses these classic questions of German Romanticism. On the way, she offers an account of the peculiar relation that was established between philosophy and music in the nineteenth century; a philosophical and political reading of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger; an account of the Wagner-Hanslick debate on musical formalism; an argument for resituating musical autonomy in the spirit of Wagner's Gesamtkuntswerk; an account of the competing performance ideals embodied in Wagner's Bayreuth; and an interpretation of Wagner's legacy as experienced by composers exiled from Nazi Germany.
Goehr's historical and musicological enquiries are unified by a philosophical study of the impact of a transcendental or critical perspective on philosophical theory. She argues that philosophy needs to take its limits seriously to accommodate the primacy of music's practice.
"This is the work of a distinguished philosopher and a well-trained musician with a sophisticated sense of history. If the musical and the musicological world were inhabited by Goehrs, it would be a far, far better place. The message of this book deserves the widest possible dissemination." --Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music and of numerous articles in aesthetics and the philosophy of music.
Ernest Bloch Lectures
Published:
224 pages
Ernest Bloch Lectures, 10
Subject: MUSIC
Rights: NA
ISBN (cloth): 0-520-21412-9
$45.00
[1] Music Theory Online (MTO) as a whole is Copyright � 1998, all rights reserved, by the Society for Music Theory, which is the owner of the journal. Copyrights for individual items published in MTO are held by their authors. Items appearing in MTO may be saved and stored in electronic or paper form, and may be shared among individuals for purposes of scholarly research or discussion, but may not be republished in any form, electronic or print, without prior, written permission from the author(s), and advance notification of the editors of MTO.
[2] Any redistributed form of items published in MTO must include the following information in a form appropriate to the medium in which the items are to appear:
This item appeared in Music Theory Online[3] Libraries may archive issues of MTO in electronic or paper form for public access so long as each issue is stored in its entirety, and no access fee is charged. Exceptions to these requirements must be approved in writing by the editors of MTO, who will act in accordance with the decisions of the Society for Music Theory.
in [VOLUME #, ISSUE #] on [DAY/MONTH/YEAR].
It was authored by [FULL NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS],
with whose written permission it is reprinted here.