Music

After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance

Kenneth Hamilton

This book dissects the oft-invoked myth of a romantic Golden Age of Pianism. It discusses the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski and Busoni, and delves into the ... More

This book dissects the oft-invoked myth of a romantic Golden Age of Pianism. It discusses the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski and Busoni, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. The book recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today; how an often unhistorical “respect for the score” began to replace pianists' improvizations and adaptations; and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. The book chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. It emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and that playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. The book presents a vivid tale of how drastically different are the recitals of the present compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming, and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical — some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly remembered as constituting a Golden Age. Less

Analytical Studies in World Music: Analytical Studies in World Music

Michael Tenzer (ed.)

Combining the approaches of ethnomusicology and music theory, this book offers perspectives for thinking about how musical sounds are shaped, arranged, and composed by their diverse ... More

Combining the approaches of ethnomusicology and music theory, this book offers perspectives for thinking about how musical sounds are shaped, arranged, and composed by their diverse makers worldwide. Eleven in-depth explanations of Iranian sung poetry, Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, Afro-Cuban drumming, Shanghai opera, flamenco, modern American chamber music, Central African group singing, Bulgarian dance tunes, South Indian song, and a Mozart piano concerto create a diverse compendium of music analyses. Through description of contexts of performance and creation, and especially compositional and formal construction, each chapter proposes stimulating ways to hear, conceive, and imagine these repertoires. Selections on the companion recordings are carefully matched with extensive transcriptions and illuminating diagrams in every chapter. Opening rich cross-cultural and comparative perspectives on music, this volume addresses the practical needs of students and scholars in the contemporary world of fusions, contact, borrowing, and curiosity about music everywhere. Less

The Art of Performance

Heinrich Schenker, Irene Schreier Scott

Heribert Esser (ed.)

From early on, Heinrich Schenker was deeply interested in performance. There are many references to a planned publication on performance, there are finished segments and many ... More

From early on, Heinrich Schenker was deeply interested in performance. There are many references to a planned publication on performance, there are finished segments and many miscellaneous related notebook-jottings, but his theoretical writings took precedence over all else and he never completed the book. This book may be taken as a compilation, as is explained in detail in the editor's introduction. It presents what Schenker regarded as one of his main missions: to rectify the direction music performance had taken in his time. He argues that for a meaningful performance of a masterwork the performer must understand the inner workings of the music. Therefore, the many players — largely pianists — who merely use the text to show their own ability do injustice to the music and mislead audiences. This holds true even for those who follow the markings of the composers slavishly but without understanding. In discussing the great composers' modes of notation and showing that their markings only indicate a desired effect, we get highly practical and imaginative advice based on the author's own experience as performing pianist and composer. He covers different aspects of pianistic technique including hand motions, legato and non legato touch, fingering, pedal, and articulation. The discussion of dynamics and tempo are equally valid for all instrumentalists. Throughout, the aim of a free, “singing” performance which comes from having assimilated the music is stressed: it results in true “re-creation”. Less

Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature

Richard Cohn

Many nineteenth-century theorists viewed triadic distance in terms of common tones and voice-leading proximity, rather than root consonance and mutual diatonic constituency. Audacious ... More

Many nineteenth-century theorists viewed triadic distance in terms of common tones and voice-leading proximity, rather than root consonance and mutual diatonic constituency. Audacious Euphony reconstructs this view and uses it as the basis for a chromatic model of triadic space, developing geometric representations from blueprints of Euler (1739) and Weitzmann (1853). The model renders coherent many passages of romantic music (e.g. of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, Chopin, Wagner) that are disjunct from the standpoint of classical tonality. Semantic attributes commonly ascribed to romantic music are theorized as the result of incompatibilities between classical and romantic conceptions of triadic distance. The model generalizes to apply to relations among Tristan-genus seventh chords, due to their structural homologies with triads. At the heart of the approach is the observation that major and minor triads are minimal perturbations of perfectly even augmented triads, and that this property underlies their status as voice-leading optimizers. Consonant triads are thus overdetermined, as they are also independently the acoustic optimizers of classical theory. Both consonant triads and Tristan-genus seventh chords are homophonous diamorphs, whose syntactic behaviors and semantic qualities require two distinct theories, as well as a third one that reconciles them in a cognitively plausible way. Among the compositions treated analytically in Audacious Euphony are Schubert “Der Doppelgänger” and “Auf dem Fluße”, his sonatas D. 959 and 960, Chopin’s e-minor prelude, fantasy, and g-minor ballade, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Liszt’s Consolation #3 and organ Kyrie, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar, Fauré’s Requiem, Brahms’s 1st and 2nd Symphonies, Wagner’s Parsifal, Bruckner’s 3rd Symphony, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and Strauss’s “Frühling.” Less

Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky

Gretchen Horlacher

A pioneer of musical modernism, Igor Stravinsky marked a significant turn in compositional method. He broke free from traditional styles and contemporary trends in the early part of the ... More

A pioneer of musical modernism, Igor Stravinsky marked a significant turn in compositional method. He broke free from traditional styles and contemporary trends in the early part of the 20th century to achieve an entirely new and truly modern aesthetic. Striking a remarkable concurrence of stasis and discontinuity, Stravinsky crafted large-scale compositions out of short repeating melodies, juxtaposed these primary motives with contrasting and varying fragments, and layered on fixed ostinati which repeated at their own rates throughout the piece. Previous scholarship on Stravinsky focuses on the disparate and independent nature of such textures, conceiving them as separated and deadlocked, unable to escape their repetitions, and having no goal. This connects Stravinsky's procedures with the more radical music of subsequent composers for whom disconnection has served as a primary aesthetic. 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. This book provides a fuller perspective, and offers a fresh approach to this music and the theoretical constructs behind it. The book portrays the whole of Stravinsky's repertoire as radical or modern not because it eschews continuity and connection, but because it places them in relation to their opposites: the music holds our interest because undeniable references toward continuity are dynamically coordinated (rather than subsumed) with stasis and discontinuity. From this vantage point, Stravinsky's music becomes a commentary on the nature of time: the music draws into relation the tension between time as it is punctuated by fixed reference and as it flows from one event to another. It is quintessentially modern because of its inherent emphasis on multiple vantage points. Less

Chopin's Polish Ballade Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom

Jonathan Bellman

Chopin's Second Ballade, op. 38, composed in the late 1830s and published in 1840, is a well‐known yet poorly understood work. Not only was the piece rumored to exist in an alternate ... More

Chopin's Second Ballade, op. 38, composed in the late 1830s and published in 1840, is a well‐known yet poorly understood work. Not only was the piece rumored to exist in an alternate version and to derive—somehow—from the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, there has even been disagreement on matters as basic as tonic key, form, and narrative content. The ballade is generally understood to relate in some way to Poland's increasingly precarious political status in the early nineteenth century and Russia's eradication of the last vestiges of Polish independence in 1831—turmoil that affected Chopin deeply on both the personal and the political levels. Discussions of the work's compositional strategies have tended to rely on the sonata‐allegro model and its contemporary variants, but these have not proven very fruitful. Instead, the formal and stylistic antecedents for the Second Ballade are to be found in the operatic repertoire, where a ballade tradition had been developing since the 1820s, and in the amateur piano repertoire, where narrative and depictive works had been a thriving genre for decades. A close examination of the Second Ballade reveals it to be a work more closely linked to the music of its time than has previously been realized: referencing well‐known operatic music and drawing on the repertoires and stock gestures of contemporary middlebrow music, it tells a story of Polish national martyrdom in a way understood by certain of Chopin's contemporaries but by virtually no one since. Reexamined in this light, the Second Ballade proves revelatory regarding both the composer's compositional aesthetic and the way his music engaged the wider culture. Less

Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis

Lawrence M. Zbikowski

This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The ... More

This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes: categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models, and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. Less

Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research

Kevin Korsyn

This book examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including ... More

This book examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, this book undertakes a critique of musical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, the book suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus, David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the “liberal ironist”, Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility”, and Steven Feld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, the book goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, it suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas. Less

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young

Jeremy Grimshaw

La Monte Young, generally regarded as the father of musical minimalism, is one of America’s most important contemporary composers--and one of the most elusive. Early on Young eschewed ... More

La Monte Young, generally regarded as the father of musical minimalism, is one of America’s most important contemporary composers--and one of the most elusive. Early on Young eschewed the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions completely unfettered by commercial concerns. At the same time, however, he exercised profound influence on such varied figures as Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and entire branches of pop music. For half a century he and his partner and collaborator, Marian Zazeela, have worked in near-seclusion in their Tribeca loft, creating works that explore the furthest extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication, acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality. Because of this seclusion, his importance as a composer has heretofore not been matched by a commensurate amount of scholarly scrutiny. Draw A Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young stands as the first monograph to examine Young’s life and work in detail. The book is a culmination of a decade of research, during which the author gained rare access to the composer and his archives. The book takes a multi-disciplinary approach that combines biography, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music analysis, and illuminates such seemingly disparate aspects of Young’s work as integral serialism and indeterminacy, Mormon esoterica and Vedic mysticism, and psychedelia and psychoacoustics. The book is a long-awaited, in-depth look at one of experimental music’s most fascinating figures. Less