This is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker.

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented in English for the first time. It features the oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the past two centuries.

This groundbreaking book offers a new perspective on a central group of music theory treatises that have long formed a background to the study of Renaissance music. Taking theorists' music examples as a point of departure, it explores fundamental questions about how music was read, and by whom, situating the reading in specific cultural contexts. In particular it illuminates the ways in which the choices of Renaissance theorists have shaped later interpretation of earlier praxis, and reflexively the ways in which modern theory has been mapped on to that practice.

This is the first publication to provide extensive annotated translations from the writings of the music theorist Ernst Kurth (1886-1946), who wrote three pioneering studies on the music of J.S. Bach, Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner. The book will familiarize today's English-speaking scholars with Kurth's theoretical ideas and innovative analytical strategies through his commentaries on the passages from these composers. An extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural background required for understanding Kurth's work.

This book explores the work of three significant American women composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It offers information on both their lives and music and skillfully interweaves history and musical analysis in ways that both the specialist and the more general reader will find compelling. Ellie Hisama suggests that recognizing the impact of a composer's identity on the music itself imparts valuable ways of hearing and understanding these works and breaks important new ground toward constructing a feminist music theory.

David Kopp's book develops a model of chromatic chord relations in nineteenth-century music by composers such as Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. The emphasis is on explaining chromatic third relations and the pivotal role they play in theory and practice. Drawing on tenets of nineteenth-century harmonic theory, contemporary transformation theory, and the author's own approach, the book presents a clear and elegant means for characterizing commonly acknowledged but loosely defined elements of chromatic harmony. The historical and theoretical argument is supplemented by many...

This series is designed for those absorbed by the theoretical and intellectual issues of music, whether as historians of ideas, as practical analysts, or as theoreticians.

This is the first English translation of Johann Friedrich Daube's Musical Dilettante: A Treatise on Composition (Vienna, 1773). Written as a practical, comprehensive guide for aristocratic dilettantes wishing to compose instrumental chamber music for their social entertainment, the treatise covers genres from duets to double fugues, and includes the earliest instruction in string quartets and idiomatic orchestration of symphonies. Daube's Musical Dilettante has long been overlooked due to his better-known Thorough-Bass in Three Chords (1756). Nevertheless, Musical Dilettante is the keystone...

The writings of Sulzer and Koch represent a significant confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch creatively adapted many of Sulzer's abstract philosophical ideas to concrete questions of musical pedagogy, showing how they could be usefully applied to the teaching and analysis of musical composition. This collaborative study and translation of the texts will be of interest to all historians of music, music theory, and historians of eighteenth-century German aesthetic thought.

This book employs Romantic poetics as well as more recent critical thought to examine Schumann's Dichterliebe of 1840.