Rethinking Mendelssohn

Rethinking Mendelssohn PDF Author: Benedict Taylor Ph.D.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190611790
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.

Rethinking Mendelssohn

Rethinking Mendelssohn PDF Author: Benedict Taylor Ph.D.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190611790
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book

Book Description
As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.

Rethinking Mendelssohn

Rethinking Mendelssohn PDF Author: Benedict Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190611782
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
""Rethinking Mendelssohn offers a new perspective on Mendelssohn's music and aesthetics, arguing for a fresh critical understanding of the composer, his music, and its central relationship to nineteenth-century culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, the present book sets a new tone for research on Mendelssohn, challenging the traditional modes of discourse about this composer in moving beyond rehabilitation and source studies to engage in rigorous criticism and analysis. In a word, it seeks to rethink the issues that shaped Mendelssohn, his music and its reception from his own day down to the present. This volume includes contributions from younger, emerging scholars as well as from some of the most prominent figures outside specialist Mendelssohn circles in order to open up new ways of understanding the composer and set out future directions in Mendelssohn studies. Particular attention is given here to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, the analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre and his historical importance in this field, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song tradition, besides offering new accounts of some of this composer's most familiar orchestral pieces. ""--

Rethinking Brahms

Rethinking Brahms PDF Author: Nicole Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197541755
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 585

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Book Description
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.

Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn PDF Author: R. Larry Todd
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195179889
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
A portrait of the distinguished composer, musician, and artist draws on his correspondence, diaries, and creative works to analyze his most distinctive achievements as well as his lesser-known pieces, exploring his religious heritage, role as a Jewish performer, and complex relationship with his sister. (Biography)

Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century

Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Eftychia Papanikolaou
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666906050
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall explores interconnections of the sacred and the secular in music and aesthetic debates of the long nineteenth century. The essays in this volume view the category of the sacred not as a monolithic attribute that applies only to music written for and performed in a religious ritual. Rather, the “sacred” is viewed as a functional as well as a topical category that enhances the discourse of cross-pollination of musical vocabularies between sacred and secular compositions, church and concert music. Using a variety of methodological approaches, the contributors articulate how sacred and religious identities coalesce, reconcile, fuse, or intersect in works from the long nineteenth century that traverse an array of genres and compositional styles.

Mendelssohn Essays

Mendelssohn Essays PDF Author: R. Larry Todd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135866694
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
When R. Larry Todd’s biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, appeared in 2003, it won acclaim from several critics as a definitive biography. In researching Mendelssohn’s life over the last two and a half decades, Todd uncovered much new information about the composer and his music, his family and his peers, and his complex reception history. Now, as we approach the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the author has chosen and compiled fifteen essays written between 1980 and 2005, including five previously unpublished, that examine several aspects of the composer whom Goethe and Heine likened to a second Mozart. Mendelssohn Essays explores Mendelssohn’s precocity, his musical impressions of British culture, the role of the visual in his music, his compositional response to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and incomplete drafts from his musical estate of three instrumental works. In addition, a group of three essays focuses on the music of Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel, perhaps the most gifted woman composer of the century, and a significant, complex figure in the formation of the Mendelssohnian style.

Moses Mendelssohn's Living Script

Moses Mendelssohn's Living Script PDF Author: Elias Sacks
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253023874
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is often described as the founder of modern Jewish thought and as a leading philosopher of the late Enlightenment. One of Mendelssohn's main concerns was how to conceive of the relationship between Judaism, philosophy, and the civic life of a modern state. Elias Sacks explores Mendelssohn's landmark account of Jewish practice--Judaism's "living script," to use his famous phrase--to present a broader reading of Mendelssohn's writings and extend inquiry into conversations about modernity and religion. By studying Mendelssohn's thought in these dimensions, Sacks suggests that he shows a deep concern with history. Sacks affords a view of a foundational moment in Jewish modernity and forwards new ways of thinking about ritual practice, the development of traditions, and the role of religion in society.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy PDF Author: John Michael Cooper
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135965609
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: A Research and Information Guide is a valuable tool for any scholar, performer, or music student interested in accessing the most pertinent resources on the life, works, and cultural context of the composer. It is an updated, annotated bibliography of resources on the biographical, musical, and religious aspects of Mendelssohn's life.

The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn

The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn PDF Author: Peter Mercer-Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521533423
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book surveys the life, work, and posthumous reception of nineteenth-century German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Hensel: String Quartet in E flat

Hensel: String Quartet in E flat PDF Author: Benedict Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651384X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Explores the unique qualities of Fanny Hensel's String Quartet and how it sits within wider scholarly discussion about female composers.