Elements of Sonata Theory


Book Description

Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study outlines a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos.




The Creation of Beethoven's 35 Piano Sonatas


Book Description

Beethoven’s piano sonatas are a cornerstone of the piano repertoire and favourites of both the concert hall and recording studio. The sonatas have been the subject of much scholarship, but no single study gives an adequate account of the processes by which these sonatas were composed and published. With source materials such as sketches and correspondence increasingly available, the time is ripe for a close study of the history of these works. Barry Cooper, who in 2007 produced a new edition of all 35 sonatas, including three that are often overlooked, examines each sonata in turn, addressing questions such as: Why were they written? Why did they turn out as they did? How did they come into being and how did they reach their final form? Drawing on the composer’s sketches, autograph scores and early printed editions, as well as contextual material such as correspondence, Cooper explores the links between the notes and symbols found in the musical texts of the sonatas, and the environment that brought them about. The result is a biography not of the composer, but of the works themselves.




The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag


Book Description

Great music arouses wonder: how did the composer create such an original work of art? What was the artist's inspiration, and how did that idea become a reality? Cultural products inevitably arise from a context, a submerged landscape that is often not easily accessible. To bring such things to light, studies of the creative process find their cutting edge by probing beyond the surface, opening new perspectives on the apparently familiar. In this intriguing study, William Kinderman opens the door to the composer's workshop, investigating not just the final outcome but the process of creative endeavor in music. Focusing on the stages of composition, Kinderman maintains that the most rigorous basis for the study of artistic creativity comes not from anecdotal or autobiographical reports, but from original handwritten sketches, drafts, revised manuscripts, and corrected proof sheets. He explores works of major composers from the eighteenth century to the present, from Mozart's piano music and Beethoven's Piano Trio in F to Kurtág's Kafka Fragments and Hommage à R. Sch. Other chapters examine Robert Schumann's Fantasie in C, Mahler's Fifth Symphony, and Bartók's Dance Suite. Kinderman's analysis takes the form of "genetic criticism," tracing the genesis of these cultural works, exploring their aesthetic meaning, and mapping the continuity of a central European tradition that has displayed remarkable vitality for over two centuries, as accumulated legacies assumed importance for later generations. Revealing the diversity of sources, rejected passages and movements, fragmentary unfinished works, and aborted projects that were absorbed into finished compositions, The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtág illustrates the wealth of insight that can be gained through studying the creative process.




Music Sketches


Book Description

This introduction provides students and scholars with the information and skills they need when studying composers' sketches.




Beethoven


Book Description

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual pieces, Kinderman shows that the deepening of Beethoven's musical thought was a continuous process over decades of his life. In this new updated edition, Kinderman gives more attention to the composer's early chamber music, his songs, his opera Fidelio, and to a number of often-neglected works of the composer's later years and fascinating projects left incomplete. A revised view emerges from this of Beethoven's aesthetics and the musical meaning of his works. Rather than the conventional image of a heroic and tormented figure, Kinderman provides a more complex, more fully rounded account of the composer. Although Beethoven's deafness and his other personal crises are addressed, together with this ever-increasing commitment to his art, so too are the lighter aspects of his personality: his humor, his love of puns, his great delight in juxtaposing the exalted and the commonplace.




Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance


Book Description

The Orpheus Institute celebrates 20 years of artistic research in music Artistic research has come of age, and with it the Orpheus Institute. Founded twenty years ago, the Institute’s purpose from the start has been to pursue research through the practice of musicians. The Orpheus Institute is of the same generation as the field it was established to explore. Like many young adults, artistic research and its structures are still constructing their identity within a wider world. How have they developed? How will they mature? How can they negotiate relationships with institutions, disciplines, and bodies of theory and yet retain the essence of their work—the critical perspective of the artist? In the last two decades there have been major changes in the dynamics and structures of culture, its institutions and constituencies. How can artistic research maintain a productive dialectic between its potential status as a discipline and its core as radical practice? These and related questions are the threads woven through this collection of essays and assessments by present and past members of the Orpheus community—researchers, scholars, administrators, advisors. Together and separately they weave a tapestry of past accomplishments, current research, and future perspectives. They celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Orpheus not with congratulations but with challenges and questions—a job for research, a job for the Institute, a job for the future. The wide range of contributors to this volume includes practitioner-researchers, theorists, and academic leaders from institutions at the forefront of artistic research in music. Contributors Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Paulo de Assis (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Leonella Grasso Caprioli (Conservatorio di Vicenza), Jonathan Impett (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Esa Kirkkopelto (University of the Arts, Helsinki), Kari Kurkela (University of the Arts, Helsinki), Susan Melrose (Middlesex University, London), Stefan Östersjö (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Gertrud Sandqvist (Malmö Art Academy), Huib Schippers, Vanessa Tomlinson, Paul Draper (Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University), Luk Vaes (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Janneke Wesseling/ Kitty Zijlmans (Leiden University)




The String Quartets of Beethoven


Book Description

"We do not understand music--it understands us." This aphorism by Theodor W. Adorno expresses the quandary and the fascination many listeners have felt in approaching Beethoven's late quartets. No group of compositions occupies a more central position in chamber music, yet the meaning of these works continues to stimulate debate. William Kinderman's The String Quartets of Beethoven stands as the most detailed and comprehensive exploration of the subject. It collects new work by leading international scholars who draw on a variety of historical sources and analytical approaches to offer fresh insights into the aesthetics of the quartets, probing expressive and structural features that have hitherto received little attention. This volume also includes an appendix with updated information on the chronology and sources of the quartets and a detailed bibliography.




Hearing Beethoven


Book Description

We're all familiar with the image of a fierce and scowling Beethoven, struggling doggedly to overcome his rapidly progressing deafness. That Beethoven continued to play and compose for more than a decade after he lost his hearing is often seen as an act of superhuman heroism. But the truth is that Beethoven's response to his deafness was entirely human. And by demystifying what he did, we can learn a great deal about Beethoven's music. Perhaps no one is better positioned to help us do so than Robin Wallace, who not only has dedicated his life to the music of Beethoven but also has close personal experience with deafness. One day, at the age of forty-four, Wallace's late wife, Barbara, found she couldn't hear out of her right ear-the result of radiation administered to treat a brain tumor early in life. Three years later, she lost hearing in her left ear as well. Over the eight and a half years that remained of her life, despite receiving a cochlear implant, Barbara didn't overcome her deafness or ever function again like a hearing person. Wallace shows here that Beethoven didn't do those things, either. Rather than heroically overcoming his deafness, as we're commonly led to believe, Beethoven accomplished something even more difficult and challenging: he adapted to his hearing loss and changed the way he interacted with music, revealing important aspects of its very nature in the process. Creating music became for Beethoven a visual and physical process, emanating from visual cues and from instruments that moved and vibrated. His deafness may have slowed him down, but it also led to works of unsurpassed profundity.




Music as Philosophy


Book Description

Beethoven's late style is the language of his ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the Diabelli Variations, the Bagatelles, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, and several smaller piano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between the Classical and Romantic traditions: in terms of their musical structure, they continue to be regarded as revolutionary. Spitzer's book examines these late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the German intellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflicting approaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from various approaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning, relating Adorno to such writers as Derrida, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as contemporary music theorists. Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (including neo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's last works offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doing so created the musical language of premodernism.