Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony
Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony

Author: Raymond Knapp

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13:

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Brahms's symphonies represent one of the most important bodies of work to come from the second half of the nineteenth century, when many of the difficult issues that have confronted composers and scholars in our own century were formulated. As the other arts at that time were turning away from romanticism, musicwaswitnessing an extended confrontation between two attitudes that had been fundamental to musical romanticism in the preceding generations: that music was on the one hand profoundly expressive and, on the other, essentially self-sufficient. Wagner set the terms for the conflict at mid-century, proclaiming the ina quacy of "absolute" music and arguing that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ended thesymphonic tradition with its demonstration that musical expressivity ultimately stems from an innate dependency on "the word." Wagner's arguments were followed, in short order, by Liszt's appropriation of thesymphonic genre to programmatic ends (with Wagner's eventual, if guarded, approval); Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch Schonen, with its influential argument for the self-sufficiency of music; and the appearance of Schumann's article "Neue Bahnen," which vested the future of music solely in the person of the young, virtually unknown Johannes Brahms, who was heralded as the awaited savior of a valued but languishing tradition

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall
Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall

Author: Katy Hamilton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1316061329

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Johannes Brahms was a consummate professional musician, and a successful pianist, conductor, music director, editor and composer. Yet he also faithfully championed the world of private music-making, creating many works and arrangements for enjoyment in the home by amateurs. This collection explores Brahms' public and private musical identities from various angles: the original works he wrote with amateurs in mind; his approach to creating piano arrangements of not only his own, but also other composers' works; his relationships with his arrangers; the deeper symbolism and lasting legacy of private music-making in his day; and a hitherto unpublished memoir which evokes his Viennese social world. Using Brahms as their focus point, the contributors trace the overlapping worlds of public and private music-making in the nineteenth century, discussing the boundaries between the composer's professional identity and his lifelong engagement with amateur music-making.

Brahms and His World
Brahms and His World

Author: Walter Frisch

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-07-06

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1400833620

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Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays by leading experts are retained and revised, and supplemented by contributions from a new generation of Brahms scholars. Together, they consider such topics as Brahms's relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, his musical interactions with the "New German School" of Wagner and Liszt, his influence upon Arnold Schoenberg and other young composers, his approach to performing his own music, and his productive interactions with visual artists. The essays are complemented by a new selection of criticism and analyses of Brahms's works published by the composer's contemporaries, documenting the ways in which Brahms's music was understood by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences in Europe and North America. A new selection of memoirs by Brahms's friends, students, and early admirers provides intimate glimpses into the composer's working methods and personality. And a catalog of the music, literature, and visual arts dedicated to Brahms documents the breadth of influence exerted by the composer upon his contemporaries.

The Music of Brahms
The Music of Brahms

Author: Michael Musgrave

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780198164012

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Michael Musgrave presents a contemporary view of Brahms 150 years after his birth, seeing him not simply as the "conservative" figure so often stressed in the past, but as one who creatively reinterpreted a wider range of historical elements than any composer of his time. Brahms absorbed his studies directly into his music making and composition and in so doing helped to evolve not merely a personal language which was regarded as progressive and sometimes difficult by a range of contemporaries and successors, but also helped to establish an ethos of historical reference which anticipates the twentieth century. The Music of Brahms concentrates on the music, with Brahms's life discussed briefly in the introduction. The works are considered in four phases according to genre, with an emphasis on connection and on the development and elaboration of a unified language. The list of works includes recent discoveries and a calendar outlines the pattern of his musical life, including relevant information concerning performances.

Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation
Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation

Author: Walter Frisch

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1990-04-20

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780520069589

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This volume is an analytical study of 18 works by Brahms, making skillful use of Schoenberg's provocative concept of developing variation. It traces a genuine evolution through Brahm's compositions, considering their relationship to each other.

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music
Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

Author: Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-05-24

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0253033195

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Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. 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, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, 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 emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

Brahms Studies
Brahms Studies

Author: Brahms Studies

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780803261969

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A publication of the American Brahms Society, Brahms Studies publishes essays on the life, work, and artistic milieu of Johannes Brahms. Each volume collects the best in Brahms scholarship, including criticism, analysis, theory, biography, archival and documentary studies, and translations of important studies that have appeared in foreign languages.

Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms

Author: Jan Swafford

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 699

ISBN-13: 9780333725894

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In an expansive study Johannes Brahms emerges from Jan Swafford's book is not a bearded eminence but rather an assemblage of contradictions. He grew up in grinding poverty and as a teenager was forced to play the piano in brothels. Recognized by his teachers as a stupendous talent, Robert Schumann proclaimed Brahms at only twenty-years-old to be the saviour of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his life living up to the that prophecy. He experienced triumphs few artists have enjoyed in their lifetime, yet lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world.

Brahms Studies
Brahms Studies

Author: David Lee Brodbeck

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1998-12-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780803212879

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The eight essays in Brahms Studies 2 provide a rich sampling of contemporary Brahms research. In his examination of editions of Brahms?s music, George Bozarth questions the popular notion that most of the composer?s music already exists in reliable critical editions. Daniel Beller-McKenna reconsiders the younger Brahms?s involvement in musical politics at midcentury. The cantata Rinaldo is the centerpiece of Carol Hess?s consideration of Brahms?s music as autobiographical statement. Heather Platt?s exploration of the twentieth-century reception of Brahms?s Lieder reveals that advocates of Hugo Wolf?s aesthetics have shaped the discourse concerning the composer?s songs and calls for an approach more clearly based on Brahms?s aesthetics. In his examination of the rise of the ?great symphony? as a critical category that carried with it a nearly impossible standard to meet, Walter Frisch provides a rich context in which to understand Brahms?s well-known early struggle with the genre. Kenneth Hull suggests that Brahms used ironic allusions to Bach and Beethoven in the tragic Fourth Symphony in order to subvert the enduring assumption that a minor-key symphony will end triumphantly in the major mode. Peter H. Smith examines Brahms?s late style by concentrating on Neapolitan tonal relations in the Clarinet Sonata in F Minor. Finally, David Brodbeck delineates the complex evolution of Brahms?s reception of Mendels-sohn?s music.

Brahms and the Scherzo
Brahms and the Scherzo

Author: Ryan McClelland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1317172841

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Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms's scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Professor Ryan McClelland provides an in-depth study of these movements that also contributes significantly to an understanding of Brahms's compositional language and his creative dialogue with musical traditions. McClelland especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms's music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In Brahms's scherzo-type movements, McClelland traces transformations of primary thematic material, demonstrating how the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative that provides structural coherence and generates expressive meaning. McClelland's interpretations of the expressive implications of Brahms's fascinatingly intricate musical structures frequently engage issues directly relevant to performance. This illuminating book will appeal to music theorists, musicologists working on nineteenth-century instrumental music and performers.