Today we think of Heinrich Schenker, who lived in Vienna from 1884 until his death in 1935, as the most influential music theorist of the twentieth century. But he saw his theoretical writings as part of a comprehensive project for the reform of musical composition, performance, criticism, and education-and beyond that, as addressing fundamental cultural, social, and political problems of the deeply troubled age in which he lived. This book aims to explain Schenker's project through reading his key works within a series of period contexts. These include music criticism, the field in which Schenker first made his name; Viennese modernism, particularly the debate over architectural ornamentation; German cultural conservatism, which is the source of many of Schenker's most deeply entrenched values; and Schenker's own position as a Galician Jew who came to Vienna just as fully racialized anti-semitism was developing there. As well as presenting an unfamiliar perspective on the cultural and political ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna, this book reveals how deeply Schenker's theory is permeated by the social and political. It also raises issues concerning the meaning and value of music theory, and the extent to which today's music-theoretical agenda unwittingly reflects the values and concerns of a very different world.
The first detailed study of Schenker's pathbreaking 1906 treatise, showing how it reflected 2500 years of thinking about harmony and presented a vigorous reaction to Austro-Germanic music theory ca. 1900.
In 1912 Heinrich Schenker contracted with the publisher Universal Edition to provide an 'elucidatory edition' (Erläuterungsausgabe) of Beethoven's last five piano sonatas. But that of the 'Hammerklavier' Sonata, op. 106, was never published. As Nicholas Marston shows in a detailed history of the Erläuterungsausgabe, despite Schenker's failure to complete the project, he nevertheless developed a voice-leading analysis of the sonata during the years 1924-1926. Marston's book provides the first in-depth study of this rich analysis, which is reproduced in full in high-quality digital images.
An examination of how the scientific study of sound sensation became increasingly intertwined with musical aesthetics in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria. In the middle of the nineteenth century, German and Austrian concertgoers began to hear new rhythms and harmonies as non-Western musical ensembles began to make their way to European cities and classical music introduced new compositional trends. At the same time, leading physicists, physiologists, and psychologists were preoccupied with understanding the sensory perception of sound from a psychophysical perspective, seeking a direct and measurable relationship between physical stimulation and physical sensation. These scientists incorporated specific sounds into their experiments—the musical sounds listened to by upper middle class, liberal Germans and Austrians. In The Psychophysical Ear, Alexandra Hui examines this formative historical moment, when the worlds of natural science and music coalesced around the psychophysics of sound sensation, and new musical aesthetics were interwoven with new conceptions of sound and hearing. Hui, a historian and a classically trained musician, describes the network of scientists, musicians, music critics, musicologists, and composers involved in this redefinition of listening. She identifies a source of tension for the psychophysicists: the seeming irreconcilability between the idealist, universalizing goals of their science and the increasingly undeniable historical and cultural contingency of musical aesthetics. The convergence of the respective projects of the psychophysical study of sound sensation and the aesthetics of music was, however, fleeting. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the professionalization of such fields as experimental psychology and ethnomusicology and the proliferation of new and different kinds of music, the aesthetic dimension of psychophysics began to disappear.
What does it mean to say that music is deeply moving? Or that music's aesthetic value derives from its deep structure? This study traces the widely employed trope of musical depth to its origins in German-language music criticism and analysis. From the Romantic aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann to the modernist theories of Arnold Schoenberg, metaphors of depth attest to the cross-pollination of music with discourses ranging from theology, geology and poetics to psychology, philosophy and economics. The book demonstrates that the persistence of depth metaphors in musicology and music theory today is an outgrowth of their essential role in articulating and transmitting Germanic cultural values. While musical depth metaphors have historically served to communicate German nationalist sentiments, Watkins shows that an appreciation for the broad connotations of those metaphors opens up exciting new avenues for interpretation.
A bold, deeply researched, and long-needed debunking of the platitudes and prejudices that have long clouded our view of the personality and compositional habits of Anton Bruckner. Bruckner was, and continues to be, among the most divisive figures in the history of nineteenth-century music, in large part owing to the complexities and contradictions of his personality and the amalgam of differing stylistic features that characterize his musical language. Miguel J. Ramirez's insightful book scrutinizes the stereotypes about Bruckner's personality that loom large in the public imagination, the controversial editorial policies behind the publication of his collected works, and the trends in the reception of his music that were set early on by a handful of Viennese journalists. Working to undo the platitudes and prejudices that cloud our view of Bruckner's true personality and compositional habits, this study debunks the entrenched misconception that he was a helpless victim of "the Viennese press"-a notion contradicted by the pugnacious exchange in which pro- and anti-Bruckner critics invariably engaged after the premiere of each of his works. Ramirez demonstrates that, from the mid 1880s onward, only Eduard Hanslick, Max Kalbeck, and a few other critics persisted in their opposition to the Brucknerian symphonic oeuvre and that their caustic and denigrating reviews were vastly outnumbered by those of more appreciative critics who heard what performers and listeners cherish now: the music's coherence, grandeur, and emotional sweep.adicted by the pugnacious exchange in which pro- and anti-Bruckner critics invariably engaged after the premiere of each of his works. Ramirez demonstrates that, from the mid 1880s onward, only Eduard Hanslick, Max Kalbeck, and a few other critics persisted in their opposition to the Brucknerian symphonic oeuvre and that their caustic and denigrating reviews were vastly outnumbered by those of more appreciative critics who heard what performers and listeners cherish now: the music's coherence, grandeur, and emotional sweep.adicted by the pugnacious exchange in which pro- and anti-Bruckner critics invariably engaged after the premiere of each of his works. Ramirez demonstrates that, from the mid 1880s onward, only Eduard Hanslick, Max Kalbeck, and a few other critics persisted in their opposition to the Brucknerian symphonic oeuvre and that their caustic and denigrating reviews were vastly outnumbered by those of more appreciative critics who heard what performers and listeners cherish now: the music's coherence, grandeur, and emotional sweep.adicted by the pugnacious exchange in which pro- and anti-Bruckner critics invariably engaged after the premiere of each of his works. Ramirez demonstrates that, from the mid 1880s onward, only Eduard Hanslick, Max Kalbeck, and a few other critics persisted in their opposition to the Brucknerian symphonic oeuvre and that their caustic and denigrating reviews were vastly outnumbered by those of more appreciative critics who heard what performers and listeners cherish now: the music's coherence, grandeur, and emotional sweep.ence, grandeur, and emotional sweep.
A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012 A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Los Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the Year This revelatory book of music history examines what is perhaps the best known and most-popular symphony ever written—and its famous four-note opening. Reaching back before Beethoven’s time, Matthew Guerrieri uncovers premonitions of the opening notes in the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry and the music of the French Revolution. He discusses the Fifth’s impact when it premiered, tracing the artistic, philosophical, and political reverberations across Europe to China, Russia, and the United States, from Romanticism to ring tones, from propaganda to pop. This fascinating piece of musical detective work is a treat for music lovers of every stripe.
The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews' former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created plenty of room for innovation and change in the realm of culture. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, and they became heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By isolating the years between the World Wars and examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as "Jewish" accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary's collapse, with profound effects on Austria's cultural legacy. In some cases, the consequences of this marking resulted in grave injustices. Philipp Halsmann, for example, was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his father years before he became a world-famous photographer. And the men who shot and killed writer Hugo Bettauer and philosopher Moritz Schlick received inadequate punishment for their murderous deeds. But engagements with the terms of Jewish difference also characterized the creation of culture, as shown in Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel The City without Jews and its film adaptation, other texts by Veza Canetti, David Vogel, A.M. Fuchs, Vicki Baum, and Mela Hartwig, and performances at the Salzburg Festival and the Yiddish theater in Vienna. By examining the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, Lisa Silverman reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost when articulated along the lines of Jewish difference.
With their insistence that form is a dialectical process in the music of Beethoven, Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus emerge as the guardians of a long-standing critical tradition in which Hegelian concepts have been brought to bear on the question of musical form. Janet Schmalfeldt's ground-breaking account of the development of this Beethoven-Hegelian tradition restores to the term "form" some of its philosophical associations in the early nineteenth century, when profound cultural changes were yielding new relationships between composers and their listeners, and when music itself-in particular, instrumental music-became a topic for renewed philosophical investigation. Precedents for Adorno's and Dahlhaus's concept of form as process arise in the Athenäum Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel and in the Encyclopaedia Logic of Hegel. The metaphor common to all these sources is the notion of becoming; it is the idea of form coming into being that this study explores in respect to music by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. A critical assessment of Dahlhaus's preoccupation with the opening of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata serves as the author's starting point for the translation of philosophical ideas into music-analytical terms-ones that encourage listening "both forward and backward," as Adorno has recommended. Thanks to the ever-growing familiarity of late eighteenth-century audiences with formal conventions, composers could increasingly trust that performers and listeners would be responsive to striking formal transformations. The author's analytic method strives to capture the dynamic, quasi-narrative nature of such transformations, rather than only their end results. This experiential approach to the perception of form invites listeners and especially performers to participate in the interpretation of processes by which, for example, a brooding introduction-like opening must inevitably become the essential main theme in Schubert's Sonata, Op. 42, or in which tremendous formal expansions in movements by Mendelssohn offer a dazzling opportunity for multiple retrospective reinterpretations. Above all, In the Process of Becoming proposes new ways of hearing beloved works of the romantic generation as representative of their striving for novel, intensely self-reflective modes of communication.
