Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis - Böcker

Schenker's Interpretive Practice is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker. Since the 1960s, American theorists and musicologists have focused almost exclusively on analytical methods distilled from Schenker's writings. Breaking from that tradition, Robert Snarrenberg returns to Schenker's texts and to the humanist roots of his approach, situating Schenker's work in the broader context of his desire to portray the richness and particularity of musical experience. Snarrenberg concentrates on four aims that Schenker hoped to achieve: to present a theoretical account of musical effects encountered in European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to represent the mindset shared among composers of that music, to convey the expressive interaction of musical effects in individual artwork, and to promote continued creative and re-creative participation in the musical tradition. Author recipient of the 1998 Young Scholar Award from the Society of Music Theory.

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Drawing on idealist aesthetics and the ideology of Bildung, he developed a holistic pedagogical method as well as a theory of musical form that gives pride of place to Beethoven. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented here in English for the first time. It features Marx's oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the last two centuries: the relation of form and content, the analysis of instrumental music, the role of pedagogy in music theory, and the nature of musical understanding.

This book examines a central group of music theory treatises that have formed the background to the study of Renaissance music. Taking theorists' music examples as a point of departure, it explores fundamental questions about how music was read, and by whom, situating the reading in specific cultural contexts. Numerous broader issues are addressed in the process: the relationship of theory and praxis; access to, and use of, printed musical sources; stated and unstated agendas of theorists; orality and literacy as it was represented via music print culture; the evaluation of anonymous repertories; and the analysis of repertories delineated by boundaries other than the usual ones of composer and genre. In particular this study illuminates the ways in which Renaissance theorists' choices have shaped later interpretation of earlier practice, and reflexively the ways in which modern theory has been mapped on to that practice.

This book provides a selection of annotated translations from Ernst Kurth's three best-known publications: Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (1917), Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners 'Tristan' (1920), and Bruckner (1925). Kurth's contemporaries considered these books to be pioneering studies in the music of J. S. Bach, Wagner and Bruckner. Professor Rothfarb's extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural environment in which Kurth was writing, referring to aspects of the early twentieth-century cultural renewal movements and to intellectual developments of the day in phenomenology, aesthetics and psychology. By reading Kurth against the cultural-intellectual background provided in the essay and commentaries, today's music historians and theorists can round out their picture of music theory in the early twentieth century.

This book explores the work of three significant American women composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It offers a unique approach to a rich body of music that deserves theoretical scrutiny and provides information on both the lives and music of these fascinating women, skilfully interweaving history and musical analysis in ways that both the specialist and the more general reader will find compelling. In this important study, Ellie Hisama has employed forms of analysis by which she links musical characteristics with aspects of the composers' identities. This is revealing both for questions of music and gender and the continuing search for meaning in music. The book thus draws attention to the value of the music of these three composers and contributes to the body of analytical work concerned with the explanation of musical language.

David Kopp's book develops a model of chromatic chord relations in nineteenth-century music by composers such as Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms. The emphasis is on explaining chromatic third relations and the pivotal role they play in theory and practice. The book traces conceptions of harmonic system and of chromatic third relations from Rameau through nineteenth-century theorists such as Marx, Hauptmann and Riemann, to the seminal twentieth-century theorists Schenker and Schoenberg and on to the present day. Drawing on tenets of nineteenth-century harmonic theory, contemporary transformation theory and the author's own approach, the book presents a clear and elegant means for characterizing commonly acknowledged but loosely defined elements of chromatic harmony, and integrates them as fully fledged entities into a chromatically based conception of harmonic system. The historical and theoretical argument is supplemented by plentiful analytic examples.

Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those musical disciplines such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology which derive from the natural sciences. In this respect his writing reflects the counter-positivism endemic to the German academic discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century. The rhetoric of this stance, however, conceals a sophisticated programme wherein Schenker situates his project in relation to these sciences, arguing his reading of the musical text as a synthesis of a descriptive psychology and an explanatory historiography (which itself embeds both paleographic and philological assumptions). This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century.

This is an English translation of Johann Friedrich Daube's Musical Dilettante: A Treatise on Composition (Vienna, 1773). Written as a practical, comprehensive guide for aristocratic dilettantes wishing to compose instrumental chamber music for their social entertainment, the treatise covers genres from duets to double fugues, and includes the earliest instruction in string quartets and idiomatic orchestration of symphonies. Daube's Musical Dilettante has long been overlooked due to his better-known Thorough-Bass in Three Chords (1756). Nevertheless, Musical Dilettante is the keystone of Daube's theoretical writing, and offers a most comprehensive view of galant composition available in a single volume. The signature of Musical Dilettante is its unique textural emphasis and Daube's examples sparkle with concertante interplay, conversational part-writing and idiomatic instrumentation. These features combine to create a volume which is not only a theoretical treatise but a record of the aesthetic and musical values of the day.

Can an abstract theory of Empfindsamkeit aesthetics have any value to a musician wishing to study composition in the classical style? The eighteenth-century German theorist and pedagogue Heinrich Koch showed how this question could be answered with a resounding yes. Starting with the systematic aesthetic theory of the Swiss encyclopedist Johann Sulzer, Koch was creatively able to adapt Sulzer's conservative ideas on ethical mimesis and rhetoric to concrete problems of music analysis and composition. In this collaborative study, Thomas Christensen and Nancy Baker have translated and analysed selected writings of Sulzer and Koch respectively, bringing to life a little-known confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch's appropriation of Sulzer's ideas to the service of music represents an important development in the evolution of Western musical thought.

This book offers a theory of Romantic song by re-evaluating Schumann's Dichterliebe of 1840, one of the most enigmatic works of the repertoire. It investigates the poetics of Early Romanticism in order to understand the mysterious magnetism and singular imaginative energy that imbues Schumann's musical language. The Romantics rejected the ideal of a coherent and organic whole and cherished the suggestive openness of the Romantic fragment, the disconcerting tone of Romantic irony and the endlessness of Romantic reflection - thereby realizing an aesthetic of fragmentation. Close readings of many songs from Dichterliebe show the singer's intense involvement with the piano's voice, suggesting a 'split Self' and the presence of the 'Other'. Seeing Schumann as the 'second poet of the poem' - here of Heine's famous Lyrisches Intermezzo - this book considers essential issues of musico-poetic intertextuality, introducing into musicology a hermeneutic that seeks to synthesize philosophical, literary-critical, music-analytical and psycho-analytical modes of thought.

This book provides a selection of annotated translations from Ernst Kurth's three best-known publications: Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (1917), Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners 'Tristan' (1920), and Bruckner (1925). Kurth's contemporaries considered these books to be pioneering studies in the music of J. S. Bach, Wagner and Bruckner. Professor Rothfarb's extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural environment in which Kurth was writing, referring to aspects of the early twentieth-century cultural renewal movements and to intellectual developments of the day in phenomenology, aesthetics and psychology. By reading Kurth against the cultural-intellectual background provided in the essay and commentaries, today's music historians and theorists can round out their picture of music theory in the early twentieth century.

Can an abstract theory of Empfindsamkeit aesthetics have any value to a musician wishing to study composition in the classical style? The eighteenth-century German theorist and pedagogue Heinrich Koch showed how this question could be answered with a resounding yes. Starting with the systematic aesthetic theory of the Swiss encyclopedist Johann Sulzer, Koch was creatively able to adapt Sulzer's conservative ideas on ethical mimesis and rhetoric to concrete problems of music analysis and composition. In this collaborative study, Thomas Christensen and Nancy Baker have translated and analysed selected writings of Sulzer and Koch respectively, bringing to life a little-known confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch's appropriation of Sulzer's ideas to the service of music represents an important development in the evolution of Western musical thought.

This is an English translation of Johann Friedrich Daube's Musical Dilettante: A Treatise on Composition (Vienna, 1773). Written as a practical, comprehensive guide for aristocratic dilettantes wishing to compose instrumental chamber music for their social entertainment, the treatise covers genres from duets to double fugues, and includes the earliest instruction in string quartets and idiomatic orchestration of symphonies. Daube's Musical Dilettante has long been overlooked due to his better-known Thorough-Bass in Three Chords (1756). Nevertheless, Musical Dilettante is the keystone of Daube's theoretical writing, and offers a most comprehensive view of galant composition available in a single volume. The signature of Musical Dilettante is its unique textural emphasis and Daube's examples sparkle with concertante interplay, conversational part-writing and idiomatic instrumentation. These features combine to create a volume which is not only a theoretical treatise but a record of the aesthetic and musical values of the day.

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Drawing on idealist aesthetics and the ideology of Bildung, he developed a holistic pedagogical method as well as a theory of musical form that gives pride of place to Beethoven. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented here in English for the first time. It features Marx's oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the last two centuries: the relation of form and content, the analysis of instrumental music, the role of pedagogy in music theory, and the nature of musical understanding.

This is the first book to examine Schubert's songs as active shaping forces in the culture of their era rather than as mere reflections of it. Responding to rising new forms of social organisation, Schubert discovered that songs could serve as a medium for shuffling and reshuffling the basic building blocks of identity and desire, especially sexual desire. His songs project a kaleidoscopic array of unexpected human types, all of whom are eligible for a sympathetic response, even the strangest and most disconcerting. Schubert sought to validate these subjective types without subordinating them to a central social or sexual norm. The book describes and contextualises this process and tracks it concretely in a wide variety of songs. Combining close attention to both music and poetry, the book addresses both specialists and non-specialists in a lively, accessible style unburdened by excessive jargon.

Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those musical disciplines such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology which derive from the natural sciences. In this respect his writing reflects the counter-positivism endemic to the German academic discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century. The rhetoric of this stance, however, conceals a sophisticated programme wherein Schenker situates his project in relation to these sciences, arguing his reading of the musical text as a synthesis of a descriptive psychology and an explanatory historiography (which itself embeds both paleographic and philological assumptions). This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century.

The terms of structuralist and post-structuralist theory have been widely debated within the field of music analysis in recent years. However, very few analyses have attempted to address the repertoire of large orchestral works of the turn of the century - works which seem most obviously to escape the categories of conventional analysis. This study uses a semiotic theory of signification in order to investigate different types of musical communication. Musical meaning is defined on several levels from structures immanent to the work, through questions of tradition and genre, to consideration of the symphony as a narrative alongside other contemporary non-musical texts. Ideas from Eco, Barthes, and Derrida are deployed within the context of close analysis of the score in order to unite specifically analytical insights with cultural hermeneutics.

This book is the first to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period. In the early 1950s, Stravinsky's compositional style began to change and evolve with astonishing rapidity. He abandoned the musical neoclassicism to which he had been committed for the preceding three decades and, with the stimulus provided by his newly gained knowledge of the music of Schoenberg and Webern, launched himself on a remarkable voyage of compositional discovery. The book focuses on five historical, analytical, and interpretive issues: Stravinsky's relationship to his serial predecessors and contemporaries; his compositional process; the problem of creating formal continuity in a repertoire so obviously discontinuous in so many ways; the problem of writing serial harmony; and the problem of expression and meaning. Challenging conventional interpretations, the book shows that Stravinsky's serial music is not only of great historical significance, but also of astonishing structural originality and emotional power.

This volume offers a new view of Joseph Haydn's instrumental music. It argues that many of Haydn's greatest and most characteristic instrumental works are 'through-composed' in the sense that their several movements are bound together into a cycle. This cyclic integration is articulated, among other ways, by the 'progressive' form of individual movements, structural and gestural links between the movements, and extramusical associations. Central to the study is a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the 'Farewell' Symphony, No. 45 in F sharp minor (1772). The analysis is distinguished by its systematic use of different methods (Toveyan formalism, Schenkerian voice leading, Schoenbergian developing variation) to elucidate the work's overall coherence. The work's unique musical processes, in turn, suggest an interpretation of the entire piece (not merely the famous 'farewell' finale) in terms of the familiar programmatic story of the musicians' wish to leave Castle Eszterhaza. In a book which relates systematically the results of analysis and interpretation, Professor Webster challenges the concept of 'classical style' which, he argues has distorted our understanding of Haydn's development, and he stresses the need for a greater appreciation of Haydn's early music and of his stature as Beethoven's equal.

This is the first intellectual biography of the French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau synthesised the vocabulary and grammar of musical practice into a concise scientific system, earning himself the popular title of 'Newton of the Arts'. Ranging widely over the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century, Thomas Christensen is able to orient Rameau's accomplishments in the light of speculative and practical considerations of music theory as well as many of the scientific ideas current in the French Enlightenment. He shows how Rameau incorporates ideas ranging from neoplatonic thought and Cartesian mechanistic metaphysics to Locke's empirical psychology and Newtonian experimental science. Additional primary documents help clarify Rameau's fascinating and stormy relationship with the Encyclopedists, Diderot, Rousseau and d'Alembert.