The Essence of Tonality / The Parsifal Christ-Experience
The Essence of Tonality / The Parsifal Christ-Experience

Author: Hermann Beckh

Publisher: Temple Lodge Publishing

Published: 2022-03-11

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1912230895

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The unique scholarship and artistic sensitivity of Prof. Dr Hermann Beckh (1875–1937) is in the process of being rediscovered. The great linguist, Orientalist and Christian priest – an active music-lover who also composed – penned pioneer works on our musical system that are respected by musicians and musicologists. This volume brings together two revised versions of his best-loved books. The Essence of Tonality is written ‘…for musicians and music-lovers who, because of their particular musicality experience something spiritual – and for spiritual seekers and sensitive people who, because of their particular spirituality, have experienced a connection with music.’ Beckh believed a spiritual view of tonality would ensure music’s, and humanity’s, future. The author elucidates the correspondence of the circle of fifths (the keys) to the zodiac. Research should be directed towards the twelve vital, spiritual key-centres, as expressing the cosmic rhythms in which we all live, rather than the abstract twelve chromatic notes of atonality. In The Parsifal Christ-Experience, Beckh’s original insights throw new and powerful light on the search for meaning in our age, for a knowledge of the heart. In the poetic libretto and remarkable music of his final creation, Wagner – acknowledged by Bruckner as ‘the Master’ – presents the Grail legend and its imagery. The psychological drama and its ultimate solution provide insights to anyone who is prepared to reflect on inner experience. Through Beckh’s references to Wagner’s own letters, as well as a remarkable letter from Nietzsche, the reader gains knowledge of the true nature of Wagner and his work.

Tonality and Transformation
Tonality and Transformation

Author: Steven Rings

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-06-10

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 019991320X

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Tonality and Transformation is a groundbreaking study in the analysis of tonal music. Focusing on the listener's experience, author Steven Rings employs transformational music theory to illuminate diverse aspects of tonal hearing - from the infusion of sounding pitches with familiar tonal qualities to sensations of directedness and attraction. In the process, Rings introduces a host of new analytical techniques for the study of the tonal repertory, demonstrating their application in vivid interpretive set pieces on music from Bach to Mahler. The analyses place the book's novel techniques in dialogue with existing tonal methodologies, such as Schenkerian theory, avoiding partisan debate in favor of a methodologically careful, pluralistic approach. Rings also engages neo-Riemannian theory-a popular branch of transformational thought focused on chromatic harmony-reanimating its basic operations with tonal dynamism and bringing them into closer rapprochement with traditional tonal concepts. Written in a direct and engaging style, with lively prose and plain-English descriptions of all technical ideas, Tonality and Transformation balances theoretical substance with accessibility: it will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists. It is a particularly attractive volume for those new to transformational theory: in addition to its original theoretical content, the book offers an excellent introduction to transformational thought, including a chapter that outlines the theory's conceptual foundations and formal apparatus, as well as a glossary of common technical terms. A contribution to our understanding of tonal phenomenology and a landmark in the analytical application of transformational techniques, Tonality and Transformation is an indispensible work of music theory.

The Language of Tonality in the Music of Bach to Bruckner
The Language of Tonality in the Music of Bach to Bruckner

Author: Hermann Beckh

Publisher:

Published: 2015-03-24

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9781910785034

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Hermann BECKH - The Language of Tonality Why are musical works named by their keys: "Mass in B minor," "Symphony in D major," and so on? Can certain things be said best, or even "only," in certain keys? Can we hear the essence of a key? Are "subjective" and "objective" relevant, or is there a higher synthesis? How could the common chord express so much musical variety for over three centuries, and for some decades concentrated in one city, Vienna, in Central Europe? Hermann BECKH's (1875-1937) tone-zodiac - by 1922, not the first to be suggested - is still respected almost a century on. With it, he explores the motivating power in our tonal system as lived - nobody's invention, so in no way a "theory." The author - acknowledged polymath who also wrote music - played on the piano all the music mentioned in this pioneer study. In his explanation of tonality as an organising, creative principle, Beckh cites music from Bach - effectively the father of tonality - concluding with Wagner's music dramas. Beckh's apparently unique perspective on Wagner is one excellent reason to re-visit him, and Beckh, too, because his tone-zodiac invites access into the workshop of creation. Beckh extends the concept of "music" and "musical." The profession of music is not challenged, but upheld - from within. To see music as "abstract," or deriving from sonic vibrations are both challenged. Through Beckh's holistic intuition, the reader is invited "backstage" to research creativity itself. There is a practical path beyond the restrictions of dualism, beyond all "feel-good" factors - whether of "Mozart," "Wagner," or any other - in order to research "what is." In-depth researchers already recognise Prof. Dr Hermann Beckh as a pioneer; musicians and music-lovers will gain innumerable enriching insights and stimuli. But even more, in telling us least about himself, and without notating a single musical example, the author is able to tell us a very great deal about the personality - of his reader. Beckh on Beckh, and by his colleagues: "In all other respects I stand on the shoulders of my predecessors in scholarship, and my particular view of life I owe to Rudolf Steiner; but in music, I feel I am really breaking ground." Steiner himself said of him in this respect, "Beckh ventures into provinces which I have not yet had an opportunity of investigating myself. And there is a great deal in what Beckh says about them." There are not many people of whom Rudolf Steiner would have made such a remark. (Alfred Heidenreich. 1938)

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process
Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process

Author: Henry Burnett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 1351571338

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Musicology, having been transmitted as a compilation of disparate events and disciplines, has long necessitated a 'magic bullet', a 'unified field theory' so to speak, that can interpret the steady metamorphosis of Western art music from late medieval modality to twentieth-century atonality within a single theoretical construct. Without that magic bullet, discussions of this kind are increasingly complicated and, to make matters worse, the validity of any transformational models and ideas of the natural evolution of styles is questioned and even frowned upon today as epitomizing a grotesque teleological bigotry. Going against current thinking, Henry Burnett and Roy Nitzberg claim that the teleological approach to observing stylistic change is still valid when considered from the purely compositional perspective. The authors challenge the traditional understanding of development, and advance a new theory of eleven-pitch tonality as it relates to the corpus of Western composition. The book plots the evolution of tonality and its bearing on style and the compositional process itself. The theory is not based on the diatonic aspect of the various tonal systems exploited by composers; rather, the theory is chromatically based - the chromatically inflected octave being the source not only of a highly ingenious developmental dialectic, but also encompassing the moment-to-moment progression of the musical narrative itself. Even the most profound teachings of Schenker, and the often startlingly original and worthwhile speculations of Riemann, Tovey, Dahlhaus and others, still provide no theory of development and so are ultimately unable to unite the various tendrils of the compositional organism into a unified whole. Burnett and Nitzberg move beyond existing theory and analysis to base their theory from the standpoint of chromatic 'pitch fields'. These fields are the specific chromatic pitch choices that a composer uses to inform and design a complete composition, utilizing

The Essence of Manifestation
The Essence of Manifestation

Author: M. Henry

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 857

ISBN-13: 9401023913

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This book was born of a refusal, the refusal of the very philosophy from which it has sprung. After the war, when it had become apparent that the classical tradition, and particularly neo-Kantianism, was breathing its last, French thought looked to Germany for its inspiration and renewal. Jean Hyppolite and Kojeve reintroduced Hegel and the "existentialists" and phenomenologists drew the attention of a curious public to the fundamental investigations of Husserl and Heidegger. If only by being understood as a phenomenological ontology, this books speaks eloquently enough of the debt it owes to these thinkers of genius. The conceptual material which it uses, particn1arly in chapters 1 to 44, outlines the Husserlian and Heideggerian horizon of the investigations. However, it is precisely this horizon which is questioned. In spite of its profundity and achievements, I wanted to show that contemporary ontology pushes to the absolute the presuppositions and the limits of the philosophy of consciousness since Descartes and even of all Western philosophy since the Greeks. An 'External' critique, viz. the opposing of one thesis to another, wonld have no sense whatever. Rather, it is interior to these presuppositions whose insufficiency had to be shown that we placed ourselves; the very concepts which were rejected were also the ones which guided the problem initially.

The Essence of Hegel's Philosophy
The Essence of Hegel's Philosophy

Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Publisher: e-artnow

Published: 2019-04-26

Total Pages: 4752

ISBN-13: 8027304660

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This extraordinary collection contains all the major works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, including the criticism of his work, his biography and all other information necessary to understand and contemplate the works of the father of absolute idealism. Contents: Introduction: The Life and Work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Books: The Phenomenology of Mind The Science of Logic The Philosophy of Mind The Philosophy of Right The Philosophy of Law The Philosophy of Fine Art Lectures on the Philosophy of History Lectures on the History of Philosophy Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God The Criticism of Hegel's Work and Hegelianism: The Basis of Morality by Arthur Schopenhauer Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche Key to Understanding Hegel by William Wallace

An Introduction to Gregorian Chant
An Introduction to Gregorian Chant

Author: Richard L. Crocker

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780300083101

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Richard L. Crocker offers in this book and its accompanying compact disc an introduction to the history and meaning of the Gregorian chant. He explains how Gregorian chant began, what functions and meanings it had over time, who heard it and where, and how it was composed, learned, written down and handed on. Crocker explains Gregorian chant and its functions within modern catholic liturgy as well as its position outside this liturgy, where the modern listener may hear it just as music. He describes the origins of the chant in the early Middle Ages, details its medieval development and use, and considers how it survived without, and later with, musical notation. The author probes the paradoxical position of the chant in monastic life -- serving as an expression of liturgical fellowship on the one hand and as the medium of solitary mystic ascent on the other. The book also includes a detailed commentary on each of twenty-six complete chants performed by the Orlando Consort and by the author on the accompanying compact disc. --From publisher's description.

Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality
Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality

Author: Carl Dahlhaus

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1400861314

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Carl Dahlhaus was without doubt the premier musicologist of the postwar generation, a giant whose recent death was mourned the world over. Translated here for the first time, this fundamental work on the development of tonality shows his complete mastery of the theory of harmony. In it Dahlhaus explains the modern concepts of harmony and tonality, reviewing in the process the important theories of Rameau, Sechter, Ftis, Riemann, and Schenker. He contrasts the familiar premises of chordal composition with the lesser known precepts of intervallic composition, the basis for polyphonic music in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Numerous quotations from theoretical treatises document how early music was driven forward not by progressions of chords but by simple progressions of intervals. Exactly when did composers transform intervallic composition into chordal composition? Modality into tonality? Dahlhaus provides extensive analyses of motets by Josquin, frottole by Cara and Tromboncino, and madrigals by Monteverdi to demonstrate how, and to what degree, such questions can be answered. In his bold speculations, in his magisterial summaries, in his command of eight centuries of music and writings on music, and in his deep understanding of European history and culture, Carl Dahlhaus sets a standard that will seldom be equalled. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The second practice of nineteenth-century tonality
The second practice of nineteenth-century tonality

Author: William Kinderman

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780803227248

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In 1861, a half-century before Arnold Schoenberg's break with tonality, a young composer associated with Liszt saw a threshold to musical modernism as lodged in the "suspension of the main key." As the unified tonal perspective of earlier music yielded increasingly to dualistic key structures often laden with chromaticism, the language of music was transformed. In The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, nine prominent theorists and historians explore aspects of this musical evolution, from Schubert to the end of the nineteenth century. Many works discussed are masterpieces of the performance repertory, ranging from Chopin's piano pieces and Wagner's music dramas to the symphonies of Bruckner. The integration of analytical and historical approaches in the essays seeks to avoid narrow specialization as well as the polemic stance of some recent studies. A critical assessment of issues including inter-textuality, narrative, and dramatic symbolism enriches this investigation of what may be described as the "second practice" of nineteenth-century tonality.