Johannes Brahms, Free But Alone

Johannes Brahms, Free But Alone PDF Author: Constantin Floros
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631612606
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
Johannes Brahms was until now widely regarded as the archetype of the «absolute musician». Based on new research, the study shows how close autobiographic and poetic elements are in fact linked to his oeuvre. Like Robert Schumann, Brahms subscribed to an aesthetic of «poetic» music. In many of his compositions he got his inspiration from personal experiences, poems or images, as is shown by hitherto unpublished documents, letters, and diary entries, as well as from close analyses of individual works. Brahms's personality, too, is seen in a new way. He adopted Joseph Joachim's motto «Frei, aber einsam», «Free but Alone». The tonal code F - A - E, the musical symbol of this, recurs frequently in his works. Not least, the English version of the book, originally published in German in 1997, includes four additional chapters that investigate novel aspects by dealing in detail with the First Symphony, the German Requiem, Nänie and the Four Serious Songs. The American Brahms Society stressed the importance of the study for all those who want to come to know the unknown Brahms.

Johannes Brahms, Free But Alone

Johannes Brahms, Free But Alone PDF Author: Constantin Floros
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631612606
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
Johannes Brahms was until now widely regarded as the archetype of the «absolute musician». Based on new research, the study shows how close autobiographic and poetic elements are in fact linked to his oeuvre. Like Robert Schumann, Brahms subscribed to an aesthetic of «poetic» music. In many of his compositions he got his inspiration from personal experiences, poems or images, as is shown by hitherto unpublished documents, letters, and diary entries, as well as from close analyses of individual works. Brahms's personality, too, is seen in a new way. He adopted Joseph Joachim's motto «Frei, aber einsam», «Free but Alone». The tonal code F - A - E, the musical symbol of this, recurs frequently in his works. Not least, the English version of the book, originally published in German in 1997, includes four additional chapters that investigate novel aspects by dealing in detail with the First Symphony, the German Requiem, Nänie and the Four Serious Songs. The American Brahms Society stressed the importance of the study for all those who want to come to know the unknown Brahms.

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music PDF Author: Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253033179
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book

Book Description
A musicologist offers a fresh look at how Brahms used the inspiration of earlier composers in his own instrumental works. As Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes reveals in this study, an essential aspect of Johannes Brahms’s art was the canny use of musical references to the works of others. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement can resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. Brahms masterfully wove such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives. Sholes argues that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms’s music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to establish his own artistic voice and place in musical history.

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art PDF Author: Laurie McManus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190083298
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion) and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or "priest of music," with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms's bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could suit the bachelor Brahms but leave the composer open to speculation. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in a more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological framework that questioned the composer's physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art, but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.

Brahms's Elegies

Brahms's Elegies PDF Author: Nicole Grimes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
A unique insight into the relationship between Brahms's music and his philosophical and literary context from a modernist perspective.

Brahms's Violin Sonatas

Brahms's Violin Sonatas PDF Author: Joel Lester
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190087056
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
Notation in Johannes Brahms's sonata scores tells violinists and pianists far more than merely what pitches to play and how long to play them--if read carefully, these scores reveal an immense amount of expression, both of musical and human essences. Joel Lester's Brahms's Violin Sonatas magnifies key passages from these scores, revealing in clear and accessible language how the composer built his themes and musical narratives and how, ultimately, Brahms's music came to sound Brahmsian. Through close readings and annotated musical examples, Brahms's Violin Sonatas guides practitioners to read scores with care and to develop their own informed interpretation of the pieces, eschewing the notion of a single "correct" interpretation of the historical score. By exploring not only the sonatas' musical elements, but also their relationship to important events in the composer's life, Lester shows how subtle components can communicate the gestures, moods, personalities, and emotions that make Brahms's music so compelling. A companion volume to the author's award-winning 1999 study Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, and Performance (OUP), Brahms's Violin Sonatas is a clear and practical guide to understanding and performing Brahms's music in the present.

Brahms's A German Requiem

Brahms's A German Requiem PDF Author: R. Allen Lott
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
ISBN: 1580469868
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Get Book

Book Description
Examines in detail the contexts of Brahms's masterpiece and demonstrates that, contrary to recent consensus, it was performed and received as an inherently Christian work during the composer's life.

Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition

Sourcebook for Research in Music, Third Edition PDF Author: Allen Scott
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253014565
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Get Book

Book Description
Since it was first published in 1993, the Sourcebook for Research in Music has become an invaluable resource in musical scholarship. The balance between depth of content and brevity of format makes it ideal for use as a textbook for students, a reference work for faculty and professional musicians, and as an aid for librarians. The introductory chapter includes a comprehensive list of bibliographical terms with definitions; bibliographic terms in German, French, and Italian; and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems. Integrating helpful commentary to instruct the reader on the scope and usefulness of specific items, this updated and expanded edition accounts for the rapid growth in new editions of standard works, in fields such as ethnomusicology, performance practice, women in music, popular music, education, business, and music technology. These enhancements to its already extensive bibliographies ensures that the Sourcebook will continue to be an indispensable reference for years to come.

Absolute Music

Absolute Music PDF Author: Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199343659
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.

The Beethoven Syndrome

The Beethoven Syndrome PDF Author: Mark Evan Bonds
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190068477
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book

Book Description
The "Beethoven Syndrome" is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer's inner self. This was a radically new way of listening that emerged only after Beethoven's death. Beethoven's music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general--and not just Beethoven--in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the paradigm of expressive objectivity gave way to one of subjectivity in the years around 1830. The framework of rhetoric thus yielded to a framework of hermeneutics: concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. In the wake of World War I, however, the aesthetics of "New Objectivity" marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high modernist aesthetic that dominated the century's middle decades. Masterfully citing a broad array of source material from composers, critics, theorists, and philosophers, Mark Evan Bonds's engaging study reveals how perceptions of subjective expression have endured, leading to the present era of mixed and often conflicting paradigms of listening.

Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology

Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology PDF Author: Matthew Gelbart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190646926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

Get Book

Book Description
European Romanticism gave rise to a powerful discourse equating genres to constrictive rules and forms that great art should transcend; and yet without the categories and intertextual references we hold in our minds, "music" would be meaningless noise. Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology teases out that paradox, charting the workings and legacies of Romantic artistic values such as originality and anti-commercialism in relation to musical genre. Genre's persistent power was amplified by music's inevitably practical social, spatial, and institutional frames. Furthermore, starting in the nineteenth century, all music, even the most anti-commercial, was stamped by its relationship to the marketplace, entrenching associations between genres and target publics (whether based on ideas of nation, gender, class, or more subtle aspects of identity). These newly strengthened correlations made genre, if anything, more potent rather than less, despite Romantic claims. In case studies from across nineteenth-century Europe engaging with canonical music by Bizet, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, and Brahms, alongside representative genres such as opéra-comique and the piano ballade, Matthew Gelbart explores the processes through which composers, performers, critics, and listeners gave sounds, and themselves, a sense of belonging. He examines genre vocabulary and discourse, the force of generic titles, how avant-garde music is absorbed through and into familiar categories, and how interpretation can be bolstered or undercut by genre agreements. Even in a modern world where transcription and sound recording can take any music into an infinite array of new spatial and social situations, we are still locked in the Romantics' ambivalent tussle with genre.