The groundbreaking analytical techniques of Heinrich Schenker have had a powerful impact on the English-speaking musical world, and their importance, a century after he embarked on his major projects, is greater than ever. A central work in the Schenkerian canon, Der Tonwille, introduced the use of voice-leading graphs that remains a critical tool for many music theorists today. This volume, the first of a two-volume English translation of Schenker's complete original text, makes these important contributions available to English readers for the first time.
In the first five...

This is the second volume of a two-volume translation of Heinrich Schenker's Der Tonwille (1921-24). Among the foremost music theorists of the twentieth century, Schenker's methods of analysis continue to be one of the most important tools of musicology.

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

Twelve authors probe the mind of the Romantic era in its thinking about music. They provide a searching examination of writings by music theorists, critics, aestheticians, philosophers, and commentators from 1800 to 1875. In doing so, they wield new critical tools as well as old, casting fresh light, for example, on familiar problems of musical form by inspecting eighteenth-century rhetoric and nineteenth-century gendered discourse; exploring Schubertian modulation and Wagnerian motif with the insights of cognitive science; reinterpreting pianistic finger exercise by way of Michel Foucault...

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.