Author : Eric Roseberry
Publisher : Garland Publishing
Page : 600 pages
File Size : 29,9 MB
Release : 1989
Category : Music
ISBN :
Author : Judith Kuhn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 38,33 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 1351548689
A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study, undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned from the historical context and an examination of the music's language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological 'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the quartets as political in nature, although there have been contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil, the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society. Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn, looking first at its historical and biographical context, with special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history, and
Author : Derek C. Hulme
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 824 pages
File Size : 26,4 MB
Release : 2010-02-18
Category : Music
ISBN : 081087265X
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, as well as the first major Soviet composer. In the fourth edition of Dmitri Shostakovich Catalogue: The First Hundred Years and Beyond, Derek C. Hulme names and describes all known musical compositions of the Russian composer. More than 175 major works are annotated and discussed, including such comprehensive details as titles and subtitles, dates of composition, instrumentation, and duration; information on dedications and premieres; arrangements by the composer and others; publication details; notes on bibliographical references and the location of the autograph score; and comprehensive chronological lists of vinyl, compact disc, and visual recordings. The entries are presented chronologically and by opus number, while indexes of names and compositions provide full accessibility. Several appendixes supplement the volume, guiding readers to further information in published sources and providing information on the composer's film, radio, television, and theatre productions; his abandoned projects and obscure works; and his recordings, including box sets and special USSR recordings. An appendix also discusses the monogram DSCH, a musical motif based on his name that permeates his compositions. This new edition also includes a comprehensive chronological chart of Shostakovich's works and historical events and several plates of memorabilia.
Author : Sarah Reichardt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 46,47 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 1351571362
Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer‘s middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende
Author : Pauline Fairclough
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 28,14 MB
Release : 2008-10-30
Category : Music
ISBN : 1139827383
As the Soviet Union's foremost composer, Shostakovich's status in the West has always been problematic. Regarded by some as a collaborator, and by others as a symbol of moral resistance, both he and his music met with approval and condemnation in equal measure. The demise of the Communist state has, if anything, been accompanied by a bolstering of his reputation, but critical engagement with his multi-faceted achievements has been patchy. This Companion offers a starting point and a guide for readers who seek a fuller understanding of Shostakovich's place in the history of music. Bringing together an international team of scholars, the book brings research to bear on the full range of Shostakovich's musical output, addressing scholars, students and all those interested in this complex, iconic figure.
Author : Michael Rofe
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 15,12 MB
Release : 2016-04-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 1317150511
Shostakovich's music is often described as being dynamic, energetic. But what is meant by 'energy' in music? After setting out a broad conceptual framework for approaching this question, Michael Rofe proposes various potential sources of the perceived energy in Shostakovich's symphonies, describing also the historical significance of energeticist thought in Soviet Russia during the composer's formative years. The book is in two parts. In Part I, examples are drawn from across the symphonies in order to demonstrate energy streams within various musical dimensions. Three broad approaches are adopted: first, the theories of Boleslav Yavorsky are used to consider melodic-harmonic motion; second, Boris Asafiev's work, with its echoes of Ernst Kurth, is used to describe form as a dynamic process; and third, proportional analysis reveals numerous symmetries and golden sections within local and large-scale temporal structures. In Part II, the multi-dimensionality of musical energy is considered through case studies of individual movements from the symphonies. This in turn gives rise to broader contextualised perspectives on Shostakovich's work. The book ends with a detailed examination of why a piece of music might contain golden sections.
Author : David Fanning
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 12,87 MB
Release : 2006-11-02
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780521028318
These eleven essays lay a foundation for a proper understanding of Shostakovich's musical language and provide new insights into issues surrounding his composition.
Author : Stephan D. Lindeman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 666 pages
File Size : 42,18 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Music
ISBN : 0415976197
Twelve-tone and serial music were dominant forms of composition following World War II and remained so at least through the mid-1970s. In 1961, Ann Phillips Basart published the pioneering bibliographic work in the field.
Author : Laurel Fay
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 490 pages
File Size : 26,46 MB
Release : 1999-11-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0199881154
For this authoritative post-cold-war biography of Shostakovich's illustrious but turbulent career under Soviet rule, Laurel E. Fay has gone back to primary documents: Shostakovich's many letters, concert programs and reviews, newspaper articles, and diaries of his contemporaries. An indefatigable worker, he wrote his arresting music despite deprivations during the Nazi invasion and constant surveillance under Stalin's regime. Shostakovich's life is a fascinating example of the paradoxes of living as an artist under totalitarian rule. In August 1942, his Seventh Symphony, written as a protest against fascism, was performed in Nazi-besieged Leningrad by the city's surviving musicians, and was triumphantly broadcast to the German troops, who had been bombarded beforehand to silence them. Alone among his artistic peers, he survived successive Stalinist cultural purges and won the Stalin Prize five times, yet in 1948 he was dismissed from his conservatory teaching positions, and many of his works were banned from performance. He prudently censored himself, in one case putting aside a work based on Jewish folk poems. Under later regimes he balanced a career as a model Soviet, holding government positions and acting as an international ambassador with his unflagging artistic ambitions. In the years since his death in 1975, many have embraced a view of Shostakovich as a lifelong dissident who encoded anti-Communist messages in his music. This lucid and fascinating biography demonstrates that the reality was much more complex. Laurel Fay's book includes a detailed list of works, a glossary of names, and an extensive bibliography, making it an indispensable resource for future studies of Shostakovich.
Author : Pauline Fairclough
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 45,94 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 1351577956
Composed in 1935-36 and intended to be his artistic 'credo', Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony was not performed publicly until 1961. Here, Dr Pauline Fairclough tackles head-on one of the most significant and least understood of Shostakovich's major works. She argues that the Fourth Symphony was radically different from its Soviet contemporaries in terms of its structure, dramaturgy, tone and even language, and therefore challenged the norms of Soviet symphonism at a crucial stage of its development. With the backing of prominent musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky, the composer could realistically have expected the premiere to have taken place, and may even have intended the symphony to be a model for a new kind of 'democratic' Soviet symphonism. Fairclough meticulously examines the score to inform a discussion of tonal and thematic processes, allusion, paraphrase and reference to musical types, or intonations. Such analysis is set deeply in the context of Soviet musical culture during the period 1932-36, involving Shostakovich's contemporaries Shebalin, Myaskovsky, Kabalevsky and Popov. A new method of analysis is also advanced here, where a range of Soviet and Western analytical methods are informed by the theoretical work of Shostakovich's contemporaries Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin and Ivan Sollertinsky, together with Theodor Adorno's late study of Mahler. In this way, the book will significantly increase an understanding of the symphony and its context.
