Download or read book Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint written by David Yearsley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bach's Germany musical counterpoint was an art involving much more than the sophisticated use of advanced compositional techniques. A range of theological, cultural, social and political meanings attached themselves to the use of complex procedures such as canon and double counterpoint. This book explores the significance of Bach's counterpoint in a range of interrelated contexts: its use as a means of reflecting on death; its parallels to alchemy; its vexed status in the galant music culture of the first half of the eighteenth century; its value as a representation of political power; and its central importance in the creation of Bach's image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Touching on a wide array of contemporary literary, philosophical, critical, and musical texts, the book includes new readings of many of Bach's late works in order to re-evaluate the status and meaning of counterpoint in Bach's work and legacy.
Download or read book Bach and the Patterns of Invention written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new interpretation of the music of J. S. Bach, we gain a striking picture of the composer as a unique critic of his age. By reading Bach’s music “against the grain” of contemporaries such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach’s approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics. “Invention”—the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition—emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus’s analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach’s working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach’s unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles—and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status. Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.
Download or read book Sex Death and Minuets written by David Yearsley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Insightful commentary on the Bach family’s musical life and . . . the culture in which the Bachs lived. . . . Important and fascinating . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history’s most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music—long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening—has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity. Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a historical subject—at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow. David Yearsley explores the notebooks’ entries against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying. “Fascinating.” —Laurence Dreyfus, University of Oxford “Yearsley’s account . . . will doubtless stand as the definitive account of the ‘Bachin’ and her notebooks for years to come.” —Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge “A warm, insightful, and compelling portrait.” —Matthew Dirst, University of Houston
Download or read book Bach s Feet written by David Yearsley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yearsley explores the cultural significance of making music with hands and feet, a mode of performance unique to the organ.
Download or read book Bach s Well tempered Clavier written by David Ledbetter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bach's Well-tempered Clavier (or the 48 Preludes and Fugues) stands at the core of baroque keyboard music and has been a model and inspiration for performers and composers ever since it was written. This invaluable guide to the 96 pieces explains Bach's various purposes in compiling the music, describes the rich traditions on which he drew, and provides commentaries for each prelude and fugue. In his text, David Ledbetter addresses the main focal points mentioned by Bach in his original 1722 title page. Drawing on Bach literature over the past three hundred years, he explores German traditions of composition types and Bach's novel expansion of them; explains Bach's instruments and innovations in keyboard technique in the general context of early eighteenth-century developments; reviews instructive and theoretical literature relating to keyboard temperaments from 1680 to 1750; and discusses Bach's pedagogical intent when composing the Well-tempered Clavier. Ledbetter's commentaries on individual preludes and fugues equip readers with the concepts necessary to make their own assessment and include information about the sources when details of notation, ornaments, and fingerings have a bearing on performance.
Download or read book The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach written by Andre Pirro and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach (L’Esthéthique de Jean-Sébastien Bach), by the celebrated French musicologist André Pirro (1869‒1943), was originally published in 1907 and reissued in 1973. It is offered here for the first time in English, as translated by Joe Armstrong. Pirro’s work is based primarily on an examination of the close relationships between language and music in Bach’s vocal works and provides us with an extensive and well-researched “lexicon” of the expressive resources of Bach and his contemporaries. Pirro’s study thus serves as a still sound basis for understanding and interpreting Bach’s instrumental works. Pirro’s engaging analysis that has informed and even moved discerning readers for more than a century. This translation introduces his work to a new audience of performers, music teachers and their students, composers, musicologists, and all who wish to have a greater understanding of the expressive import of Bach’s music.
Download or read book Bach s Numbers written by Ruth Tatlow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century Germany the universal harmony of God's creation and the perfection of its proportions still held philosophical, moral and devotional significance. Reproducing proportions close to the unity (1:1) across compositions could render them beautiful, perfect and even eternal. Using the principles of her groundbreaking theory of proportional parallelism and the latest source study research, Ruth Tatlow reveals how Bach used the number of bars to create numerical perfection across his published collections, and explains why he did so. The first part of the book illustrates the wide-ranging application of belief in the unity, showing how planning a well-proportioned structure was a normal compositional procedure in Bach's time. In the second part Tatlow presents practical demonstrations of this in Bach's works, illustrating the layers of proportion that appear within a movement, a work, between two works in a collection, across a collection and between collections.
Download or read book Johann Sebastian Bach written by Christoph Wolff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback, this landmark biography was first published in 2000 to mark the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach's death. Written by a leading Bach scholar, this book presents a new picture of the composer. Christoph Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between Bach's life and his music, showing how the composer's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as a musician, composer, performer, scholar, and teacher.
Download or read book Music for a Mixed Taste written by Steven David Zohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-length study of Telemann's concertos, sonatas, and suites focuses on his imaginative mixing of styles and genres. Special attention is also devoted to the extra musical meanings and humor of his programmatic overture-suites, his unprecedented self-publishing enterprise, and the social resonances of his Polish-style works.
Download or read book Bach The Brandenburg Concertos written by Malcolm Boyd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-09-24 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Brandenburg Concertos represent a pinnacle in the history of the Baroque concerto. This analysis places the concertos in their historical context, investigates their sources, traces their origins and discusses the changing traditions of performance.
Download or read book J S Bach s Johannine Theology written by Eric Chafe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bach's Johannine Theology: The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 is a fertile examination of this group of fourteen surviving liturgical works. Renowned Bach scholar Eric Chafe begins his investigation into Bach's theology with the composer's St. John Passion, concentrating on its first and last versions. Beyond providing a uniquely detailed assessment of the passion, Bach's Johannine Theology is the first work to take the work beyond the scope of an isolated study, considering its meaning from a variety of musical and historical standpoints. Chafe thereby uncovers a range of theological implications underlying Bach's creative approach itself. Building considerably on his previous work, Chafe here expands his methodological approach to Bach's vocal music by arguing for a multi-layered approach to religion in Bach's compositional process. Chafe bases this approach primarily on two aspects of Bach's theology: first, the specific features of Johannine theology, which contrast with the more narrative approach found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke); and second, contemporary homiletic and devotional writings - material that is not otherwise easily accessible, and less so in English translation. Bach's Johannine Theology provides an unprecedented, enlightening exploration of the theological and liturgical contexts within which this music was first heard.
Download or read book Consuming Music written by Emily Green and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of nine essays investigates the consumption of music during the long eighteenth century, providing insights into the activities of composers, performers, patrons, publishers, theorists, impresarios, and critics. The successful sale and distribution of music has always depended on a physical and social infrastructure. Though the existence of that infrastructure may be clear, its organization and participants are among the least preserved and thus least understood elements of historical musical culture. Who bought music and how did those consumers know what music was available? Where was it sold and by whom? How did the consumption of music affect its composition? How was consumers' musical taste shaped and by whom? Focusing on the long eighteenth century, this collection of nine essays investigates such questions from a variety of perspectives, each informed by parallels betweenthe consumption of music and that of dance, visual art, literature, and philosophy in France, the Austro-German lands, and the United States. Chapters relate the activities of composers, performers, patrons, publishers, theorists, impresarios, and critics, exploring consumers' tastes, publishers' promotional strategies, celebrity culture, and the wider communities that were fundamental to these and many more aspects of musical culture. CONTRIBUTORS: Glenda Goodman; Roger Mathew Grant; Emily H. Green; Marie Sumner Lott; Catherine Mayes; Peter Mondelli, Rupert Ridgewell, Patrick Wood Uribe, Steven Zohn Emily H. Green is assistant professor of music at George Mason University. Catherine Mayes is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Utah.
Download or read book Music Preferred written by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and published by Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag. This book was released on 2018-05-28 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions to this Festschrift, honouring the distinguished Irish musicologist Harry White on his sixtieth birthday, have wide repercussions and span a broad timeframe. But for all its variety, this volume is built around two axes: on the one hand, attention is focussed on the history of music and literature in Ireland and the British Isles, and on the other, topics of the German and Austrian musical past. In both cases it reflects the particular interest of a scholar, whose playful, sometimes unconventional way of approaching his subject is so refreshing and time and again leads to innovative, surprising insights. It also reflects a scholar, who – for all the broadening of his perspectives that has taken place over the years – has always adhered to the strands of his scholarly preoccupations that have become dear to him: the music of the 'Austro-Italian Baroque', and Irish musical culture first and foremost. An international cast of authors announces the sustaining influence of Harry White's wide-ranging research. Professor Dr Thomas Hochradner Chair of the Department of Musicology University of Music and Dramatic Arts Mozarteum Salzburg
Download or read book Sei Solo Symbolum written by Benjamin Jeffery Shute and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the jewels in the crown of Johann Sebastian Bach's sacred music is its use of astonishingly subtle and complex allegorical and representational devices. But when similar devices appear in the context of one of Bach's untexted, secular, instrumental collections such as the Six Solos (sonatas and partitas) for violin, the question arises whether he might be intending to embed discernible theological significances there as well, thus infusing the secular with the sacred. Such designs would be reasonably plausible within Bach's musical, cultural, and religious context. Shute carefully investigates the extent to which musical features of the Six Solos that seem to invite theological parallels might indeed have been intended to do so. Although the precise extent of Bach's intentions cannot be ascertained with certainty, the degree of correlation among strong potential signifiers would seem to suggest that they, and many other features of the Six Solos, are best explained as the product of extensive theological-allegorical designs on Bach's part, like those evident in his texted vocal music.
Download or read book Ferruccio Busoni As Architect of Sound written by Associate Professor of Music History Erinn E Knyt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents a broad view of Busoni's compositional activities as not only connected to musical traditions of the past, especially the music of J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart, but also as closely aligned with contemporary interest in experimentalism. Developments during the twentieth century included new means of pitch organization, the spatialization of sound, and the expansion of formal structures. Busoni helped pioneer these trends by writing pieces in which sound radiates from different directions, by creating montage formal structures, and by freely using all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale without avoiding consonances. In the process, the book brings Busoni's music into discourse with recent multivalent accounts of modernism in music that move beyond notions of rupture with the past as well as beyond elitist esotericism. In addition, it reveals that many of Busoni's innovations were rooted in interdisciplinary thinking that reconciled the spatial and the temporal in unique manners. While his abstract metaphysical notions of music transcended physical boundaries, the realization of his ideas was informed by an understanding of tangible architectural spaces and styles fostered by the study of buildings and floor plans. In addition, he engaged in a rich exchange of ideas with contemporary architects and artists, such as Henry Van de Velde and members of the Weimar Bauhaus. The book concludes by documenting ways Busoni's spatialized architectural music left a lasting imprint on future generations of composers, artists, and early film pioneers, such as Hans Richter, Heinrich Neugeboren, Wladimir Vogel, Stefan Wolpe, and Edgard Varèse"--
Download or read book The Musical Discourse of Servitude written by Harry White and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Musical Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of how the late baroque musical imagination developed by comparing the compositions of Johann Joseph Fux, J. S. Bach, and G. F. Handel.
Download or read book Hearing Faith written by Andrew A. Cashner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-07-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hearing Faith explores the ways Roman Catholics in the seventeenth-century Spanish Empire used music to connect faith and hearing. From the Royal Chapel in Madrid to Puebla Cathedral in colonial Mexico, communities celebrated Christmas and other feasts with villancicos, a widespread genre of vernacular poetry and devotional music. A large proportion of villancico texts directly address the nature of hearing and the power of music to connect people to God. By interpreting complex and fascinating examples of “music about music” in the context of contemporary theological writing, the book shows how Spanish Catholics embodied their beliefs about music, through music itself. Listening closely to these previously undiscovered and overlooked archival sources reveals how Spanish subjects listened and why.
