Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those musical disciplines such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology which derive from the natural sciences. In this respect his writing reflects the counter-positivism endemic to the German academic discourse of the first decades of the 20th century. The rhetoric of this stance, however, conceals a sophisticated program wherein Schenker situates his project in relation to these sciences, arguing his reading of the musical text as a synthesis of...
Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those m...
The terms of structuralist and post-structuralist theory have been widely debated within the field of music analysis in recent years. However, very few analyses have attempted to address the repertoire of large orchestral works of the turn of the century - works which seem most obviously to escape the categories of conventional analysis. This study uses a semiotic theory of signification in order to investigate different types of musical communication. Musical meaning is defined on several levels from structures immanent to the work, through questions of tradition and genre, to consideration...
The terms of structuralist and post-structuralist theory have been widely debated within the field of music analysis in recent years. However, very fe...
This book is the first to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period. In the early 1950s, Stravinsky's compositional style began to change and evolve with astonishing rapidity. He abandoned the musical neoclassicism to which he had been committed for the preceding three decades and, with the stimulus provided by his newly gained knowledge of the music of Schoenberg and Webern, launched himself on a remarkable voyage of compositional discovery. The book focuses on five historical, analytical, and interpretive issues: Stravinsky's relationship to his serial predecessors...
This book is the first to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period. In the early 1950s, Stravinsky's compositional style bega...
This book demonstrates, in fascinating diversity, how musicians in the nineteenth century thought about and described music. The analysis of music took many forms (verbal, diagrammatic, tabular, notational, graphic), was pursued for many different purposes (educational, scholarly, theoretical, promotional) and embodied very different approaches. This, the first volume, is concerned with writing on fugue, form and questions of style in the music of Palestrina, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner and presents analyses of complete works or movements by the most significant theorists and...
This book demonstrates, in fascinating diversity, how musicians in the nineteenth century thought about and described music. The analysis of music too...
This volume offers a new view of Joseph Haydn's instrumental music. It argues that many of Haydn's greatest and most characteristic instrumental works are 'through-composed' in the sense that their several movements are bound together into a cycle. This cyclic integration is articulated, among other ways, by the 'progressive' form of individual movements, structural and gestural links between the movements, and extramusical associations. Central to the study is a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the 'Farewell' Symphony, No. 45 in F sharp minor (1772). The analysis is distinguished by...
This volume offers a new view of Joseph Haydn's instrumental music. It argues that many of Haydn's greatest and most characteristic instrumental works...
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.
This book explores the work of three significant American women composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It ...
In this second volume of nineteenth-century music analyses, Ian Bent provides a further selection of newly translated writings of nineteenth-century music critics and theorists, including composers such as Wagner, Schumann and Berlioz, and critics such as A. B. Marx and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Where Volume I, on Fugue, Form and Style, presented nineteen analyses of a technical nature, all the writing here involves a metaphorical style of verbalised description, some pure examples, and others hybrid forms mixed with technical analysis. The music analysed is amongst the best-known in the repertoire:...
In this second volume of nineteenth-century music analyses, Ian Bent provides a further selection of newly translated writings of nineteenth-century m...
The work of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), widely regarded as the most important music theorist of the twentieth century, has shaped the teaching of music theory in the United States profoundly and influenced theorists there, in Europe, and throughout the world. Living and working in Vienna, Schenker maintained a vigorous correspondence with a large circle of professional musicians, writers, music critics, institutions, administrators, patrons, friends, and pupils. A large part of his correspondence was preserved after his death: some 7,000 letters, postcards, telegrams, etc., to and from 400...
The work of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), widely regarded as the most important music theorist of the twentieth century, has shaped the teaching of m...