Author : Thomas Benjamin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 45,37 MB
Release : 2004-03
Category : Art
ISBN : 1135946639
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author : Johann Fux
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 26,27 MB
Release : 1965
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780393002775
The most celebrated book on counterpoint is Fux's great theoretical work GRADUS AD PARNASSUM. Since its appearance in 1725, it has been used by and has directly influenced the work of many of the great composers, including J.S. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven. Originally written in Latin, this work has been translated in to the principal European languages. The present translation by Alfred Mann is the first faithful rendering in English, presenting the essence of Fux's teachings.
Author : Christoph Neidhofer
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 40,45 MB
Release : 2024-01-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 143849324X
This book teaches Baroque compositional techniques through writing and improvisation exercises and analysis of repertoire examples. It provides readers with a historical outlook by focusing largely on principles taught in treatises from the period 1680–1780. This expanded edition includes new sections with keyboard exercises that provide training in Partimento performance as it was practiced at the time, helping students master Baroque style from the inside. While the focus of the book is on fugue, it also treats chorale preludes, stylized dances, inventions, and trio sonatas. The volume is divided into two parts—basic and advanced— which could be taught in a two-semester sequence. There are various options to introduce material from Part II into Part I for a one-semester course.
Author : William Reginald Pasfield
Publisher :
Page : 58 pages
File Size : 25,13 MB
Release : 1961
Category : Counterpoint
ISBN :
Author : Philip Kennicott
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 32,24 MB
Release : 2020-02-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0393635376
A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer’s greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach’s compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?
Author : Neale B. Mason
Publisher : Brown & Benchmark
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 38,54 MB
Release : 1968
Category : Music
ISBN :
Author : Laurence Dreyfus
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 50,59 MB
Release : 2004-03-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 0674013565
In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach’s music “against the grain” of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach’s approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics. “Invention”—the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition—emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus’s analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach’s working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach’s unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles—and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status. Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.
Author : Teresa Davidian
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 14,53 MB
Release : 2015-02-10
Category : Music
ISBN : 1442234601
Students today have grown up in the age of digital technology. As a result, they process information in radically different ways than preceding generations. They like their information fast and consider visual images as important as textual content. In Tonal Counterpoint for the 21st-Century Musician, Teresa Davidian finally provides students a textbook that is quick, direct, and visual—a direct reflection of the age in which they live. This book is easy to understand, comprehensive, and distinctly modern in its approach to the study of counterpoint. Written in a style that is clear, simple, and informal writing style, Davidian artfully mixes the history of counterpoint with an outline of its structure, placing musical examples from J. S. Bach side by side with those from The Beatles to illustrate the universality and currency of counterpoint in music analysis and composition. Designed as a single-semester introduction, Tonal Counterpoint brings the study of counterpoint into the present by: Making ample use of diagrams and flow charts Including helpful step-by-step prompt sheets for analyzing inventions and fugues Placing just as much emphasis on the composition as on the analysis of counterpoint Offering a broad array of musical examples, including the work of women composers, American songwriters, current students, and pop music composers Throughout, Davidian explains how the techniques of 18th-century contrapoint still readily apply to how music is composed today. Tonal Counterpoint for the 21st-Century Musician is ideal for students in the fields of music theory, composition, music history, and performance.
Author : Robin A. Leaver
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 35,65 MB
Release : 2018-10-24
Category : Music
ISBN : 0252050711
Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang many of the same vernacular hymns. Internal squabbles were rarely missing within Lutheranism, for example Pietists' dislike of concerted church music, especially if it employed specific dance forms. Also investigated here are broader issues such as the close affinity between Bach's cantata libretti and the hymns of Charles Wesley; and Bach's music in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment as shaped by Protestant Rationalism in Berlin. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Joyce L. Irwin, Robin A. Leaver, Mark Noll, Markus Rathey, Derek Stauff, and Janice B. Stockigt.
Author : Carl Schachter
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 25,45 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Music
ISBN : 0190227397
Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been felt in the classroom. At the Mannes College of Music, the Juilliard School of Music, Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at special pedagogical events around the world, he has taught generations of musical performers, composers, historians, and theorists over the course of his long career. In Fall 2012, Schachter taught a doctoral seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in which he talked about the music and the musical issues that have concerned him most deeply; the course was in essence a summation of his extensive and renowned teaching. In The Art of Tonal Analysis, winner of the Society for Music Theory's 2017 Citation of Special Merit, music theorist Joseph Straus presents edited transcripts of those lectures. Accompanied by abundant music examples, including analytical examples transcribed from the classroom blackboard, Straus's own visualizations of material that Schachter presented aurally at the piano, and Schachter's own extended Schenkerian graphs and sketches, this book offers a vivid account of Schachter's masterful pedagogy and his deep insight into the central works of the tonal canon. In making the lectures of one of the world's most extraordinary musicians and musical thinkers available to a wide audience, The Art of Tonal Analysis is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of music.
