This volume completes Newman's monumental study of the sonata. It examines the evolution of the sonata idea from the prexcocious Romanticisms of Dussek before 1880 to the near exhaustion of Romantic music by the time of World War I. Thoroughly documented, illustrated by new extended lists of sonatas as well as the fullest bibliography of Romantic music literature yet published, the book is invaluable to musicians. Originally published in 1969. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
About the Book The purpose of Vibrant Keyboard Sonorities is to provide a comprehensive, critical evaluation, and appreciation of the 450-year history of the keyboard sonata. This history should be of interest to all those who are musicians, music historians and lovers of Classical music. This subject will be of great interest and relevance to all music lovers. Also, these volumes will serve as reference works and would be excellent introductory textbooks for college-level music students. This source of comprehensive information about the keyboard sonata is fully available through this book alone. This is the first text of its nature with information that is not fully available in one source elsewhere. About the Author Robert M. White, M.D. is a retired pathologist who pursues several hobbies and interests outside of medicine. His hobbies include playing the piano, long distance running, and avid reading. He is actively involved in his church and in several community service-oriented organizations. His real passion is Classical music, and for more than fifty years, he has been a serious student of Classical music in all of its forms. Dr. White is the author of two recently published reference books: Sounding Together: A History of the Symphony (2019) and Performing Together: A History of the Keyboard Concerto (2021). His playing of the piano since childhood has afforded his extensive knowledge of piano literature.
"Nobody writes better about music .... again and again, unerring insight into just the features that make the music special and fine."--The New York Review of Books
*Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal* A moving and uplifting history set to music that reveals the rich life of one of the first internationally renowned female violinists. Spanning generations, from the shores of the Black Sea to the glittering concert halls of New York, The Nightingale's Sonata is a richly woven tapestry centered around violin virtuoso Lea Luboshutz. Like many poor Jews, music offered an escape from the predjudices that dominated society in the last years of the Russian Empire. But Lea’s dramatic rise as an artist was further accentuated by her scandalous relationship with the revolutionary Onissim Goldovsky. As the world around them descends in to chaos, between revolution and war, we follow Lea and her family from Russia to Europe and eventually, America. We cross paths with Pablo Casals, Isadora Duncan, Emile Zola and even Leo Tolstoy. The little girl from Odessa will eventually end up as one of the founding faculty of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, but along the way she will lose her true love, her father, and watch a son die young. The Iron Curtain would rise, but through it all, she plays on. Woven throughout this luminous odyssey is the story is Cesar Franck’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano.” As Lea was one of the first-ever internationally recognized female violinists, it is fitting that this pioneer was one of the strongest advocates for this young boundary-pushing composer and his masterwork.
A comprehensive and immersive survey of thirty-five Beethoven piano sonatas Beethoven's piano sonatas are among the iconic cornerstones of the classical music repertoire. Jan Marisse Huizing offers an in-depth study of the sonatas using available autographs, first editions, recordings, and nearly three hundred musical examples. Digging into the historical background and historical performance practice, the book provides illuminating detail on Beethoven's pianism as well as his characteristics of notation, form and content, "types of touch," articulation, beaming, pedal indications, character, rubato, meter, metric constructions, tempo, and metronome marks. Packed with anecdotes, quotations, and considerable new information, the book will inspire all involved with these masterworks, playing a fortepiano or modern Grand, giving the sense of the composer sitting beside them as he translates his inspiration and ideas into his notation.
Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive, richly detailed rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study draws upon the joint strengths of current music history and music theory to outline a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos. In so doing, it also lays out the indispensable groundwork for anyone wishing to confront the later adaptations and deformations of these basic structures in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Combining insightful music analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, the book brims over with original ideas, bold and fresh ways of awakening the potential meanings within a familiar musical repertory. Sonata Theory grasps individual compositions-and each of the individual moments within them-as creative dialogues with an implicit conceptual background of flexible, ever-changing historical norms and patterns. These norms may be recreated as constellations "compositional defaults," any of which, however, may be stretched, strained, or overridden altogether for individualized structural or expressive purposes. This book maps out the terrain of that conceptual background, against which what actually happens-or does not happen-in any given piece may be assessed and measured. The Elements guides the reader through the standard (and less-than-standard) formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also emphasizing the fundamental role played by processes of large-scale circularity, or "rotation," in the crucially important ordering of musical modules over an entire movement. The book also illuminates new ways of understanding codas and introductions, of confronting the generating processes of minor-mode sonatas, and of grasping the arcs of multimovement cycles as wholes. Its final chapters provide individual studies of alternative sonata types, including "binary" sonata structures, sonata-rondos, and the "first-movement form" of Mozart's concertos.
This definitive volume, the second, largest, and most central in Newman's History of the Sonata Idea, covers the period from the first sample Italian sonatas using the new techniques of the Alberti bass about 1735 to the succession of masterpieces by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven which extended until about 1820. It is one of the few books to deal exclusively with the classical era in music. Originally published in 1963. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
