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,...

The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the then-operative modal system. To unravel this mystery, Charles Atkinson creates a broad framework that moves from Greek harmonic theory to the various stages in the transmission of Roman chant, citing numerous music treatises from the sixth to the twelfth century. Out of this examination emerges the central point behind the problem: the tone-system advocated by writers coming from the Greek...

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the...

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s and the women who managed, sang in, and bankrolled these companies.

Lateness and Brahms takes up the fascinating, yet understudied problem of how Brahms fits into the culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Brahms's conspicuous and puzzling absence in previous scholarly accounts of the time and place raises important questions, and as Margaret Notley demonstrates, the tendency to view him in neutralized, ahistorical terms has made his music seem far less interesting than it truly is.

In pursuit of an historical Brahms, Notley focuses on the later chamber music, drawing on various documents and perspectives, but with particular emphasis on the...