Nicole Grimes – författare

As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.

Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.

Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.

If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn’s music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer’s life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.

If the invective of Nietzsche and Shaw is to be taken as an endorsement of the lasting quality of an artist, then Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy takes pride of place beside Tennyson and Brahms in the canon of great nineteenth-century artists. Mendelssohn Perspectives presents valuable new insights into Mendelssohn’s music, biography and reception. Critically engaging a wide range of source materials, the volume combines traditional musical-analytical studies with those that draw on other humanistic disciplines to shed new light on the composer’s life, and on his contemporary and posthumous reputations. Together, these essays bring new historical and interpretive dimensions to Mendelssohn studies. The volume offers essays on Mendelssohn's Jewishness, his vast correspondence, his music for the stage, and his relationship with music of the past and future, as well as the compositional process and handling of form in the music of both Mendelssohn and his sister, the composer Fanny Hensel. German literature and aesthetics, gender and race, philosophy and science, and issues of historicism all come to bear on these new perspectives on Mendelssohn.