Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow


Book Description

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn’s career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven’s, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies—including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays—that offered new performance tools, fostered musical innovation, and shaped the very idea of “pure” music. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow is a fascinating exploration of the early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism. Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection—composers’ treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad—could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.




Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow


Book Description

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn's career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven's, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies-including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays-that offered new performance tools, fostered musical innovation, and shaped the very idea of "pure" music. Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow is a fascinating exploration of the early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism. Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection-composers' treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad-could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.




The Haydn Economy


Book Description

Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, this book uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities. In this far-reaching work of music history and criticism, Nicholas Mathew reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. In the process, Mathew tackles critical questions of particular moment: how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late eighteenth-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined. The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew asserts, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.




Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire


Book Description

Packed full of new archival evidence that reveals the interconnected world of music theatre during the 'Classical era', this interdisciplinary study investigates key locations, genres, music, and musicians. Austin Glatthorn explores the extent to which the Holy Roman Empire delineated and networked a cultural entity that found expression through music for the German stage. He maps an extensive network of Central European theatres; reconstructs the repertoire they shared; and explores how print media, personal correspondence, and their dissemination shaped and regulated this music. He then investigates the development of German melodrama and examines how articulations of the Holy Roman Empire on the musical stage expressed imperial belonging. Glatthorn engages with the most recent historical interpretations of the Holy Roman Empire and offers quantitative, empirical analysis of repertoire supported by conventional close readings to illustrate a shared culture of music theatre that transcended traditional boundaries in music scholarship.




Beethoven


Book Description

**WINNER of Presto Books' Best Composer Biography** NINE WORKS OF BEETHOVEN, NINE WINDOWS INTO THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF A MUSICAL GENIUS. 'We are doubly blessed that Beethoven should have led such an extraordinary life. Laura has combined the two - the genius of his music and the richness of his experiences - to shine a revealing light on our greatest composer' John Humphrys _________________________ Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, simply the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths. In Beethoven, Oxford professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise. With each chapter focusing on a period of his life, piece of music and revealing theme - from family to friends, from heroism to liberty - she provides a rich insight into the man and the music. Revealing a wealth of never-before-seen material, this tour de force is a compelling, accessible portrayal of one of the world's most creative minds and it will transform how you listen for ever. _________________________ 'Tunbridge has come up with the seemingly impossible: a new way of approaching Beethoven's life and music . . . profoundly original and hugely readable' John Suchet, author Beethoven: The Man Revealed 'This well researched and accessible book is a must read for all who seek to know more about the flesh and blood tangible Beethoven.' John Clubbe, author of Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary 'This book is really wonderful! ... However many books on Beethoven you own, find the space for one more. This one' Stephen Hough, pianist, composer, writer 'In a year when everyone's looking for a new take on Beethoven, Laura Tunbridge has found nine. Fresh and engaging' Norman Lebrecht, author of Genius and Anxiety 'Remarkable . . . she captures the essence of his genius and character. I'll always want to keep it in easy reach' Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the third Reich




The Sound of the English Picturesque


Book Description

Revealing the connections between the veneration of national landscape and eighteenth- century English vocal music, this study restores English music’s relationship with the picturesque. In the eighteenth century, the emerging taste for the picturesque was central to British aesthetics, as poets and painters gained popularity by glorifying the local landscape in works concurrent with the emergence of native countryside tourism. Yet English music was seldom discussed as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. Stephen Groves explores this gap, and shows how secular song, the glee, and national theatre music expressed a uniquely English engagement with landscape. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Groves addresses the apparent ‘silence’ of the English picturesque. The book draws on analysis of the visualisations present in the texts of English vocal music, and their musical treatment, to demonstrate how local composers incorporated celebrations of landscape into their works. The final chapter shows that the English picturesque was a crucial influence on Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. Suitable for anyone with an interest in eighteenth- century music, aesthetics, and the natural environment, this book will appeal to a wide range of specialists and non- specialists alike.




Magician of Sound


Book Description

French composer Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a magician, conjurer, and illusionist. Scholars have been aware of this historical curiosity, but none so far have explained why Ravel attracted such critiques or what they might tell us about how to interpret his music. Magician of Sound examines Ravel's music through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre, orchestral effects, figure/ground relationships, and impressions of motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology, philosophy, and the history of magic, Jessie Fillerup develops an approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's fascination with machines and creates compelling links between his music and other forms of aesthetic illusion, from painting and poetry to fiction and phantasmagoria. Fillerup analyzes scenes of enchantment and illusory effects in Ravel's most popular works, including Boléro, La Valse, Daphnis et Chloé, and Rapsodie espagnole, relating his methods and musical effects to the practice of theatrical conjurers. Drawing on a rich well of primary sources, Magician of Sound provides a new interdisciplinary framework for interpreting this enigmatic composer, linking magic and music.




Schinkel ‘in Athens’: Meta-Narratives of 19th-Century City Planning


Book Description

This book offers a fresh appraisal of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s urban design legacy and his involvement in the design of modern Athens in the 1830s. It challenges the common perception of Schinkel’s proposed palace atop the Acropolis of Athens (1834) as a utopian scheme, detached from the realities of nineteenth-century Greece.




Peculiar Attunements


Book Description

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.




Hearing Beethoven


Book Description

“[The book] deepens readers’ knowledge of Beethoven’s artistic life while broadening their understanding of hearing and loss. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal We’re all familiar with the image of a scowling Beethoven, struggling 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. 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. Wallace’s late wife, Barbara, lost her hearing. Despite receiving a cochlear implant, Barbara didn’t overcome her deafness or ever function again like a hearing person. Beethoven also never overcame his deafness. But the composer accomplished something even more 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. Wallace tells the story of Beethoven’s creative life, interweaving it with his and Barbara’s experience to reveal aspects that only living with deafness could open up. The result makes Beethoven and his music more accessible, helping us see how a disability can enhance human wholeness. “A convincing and moving probe into Beethoven’s essence. . . . one senses the author’s profound love and admiration for his lost wife and for Beethoven himself.” —Harvey Sachs, author of The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824