The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint

The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint PDF Author: Thomas Benjamin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135946639
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint

The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint PDF Author: Thomas Benjamin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135946639
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Get Book

Book Description
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning

Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning PDF Author: Philip Kennicott
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635376
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize–winning critic’s “lyrical and haunting” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) reflection on the meaning and emotional impact of a Bach masterwork. As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn’t seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach’s music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer’s greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach’s compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?

Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint

Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint PDF Author: David Yearsley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521803465
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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.

Study of Counterpoint

Study of Counterpoint PDF Author: Johann Fux
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393002775
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The most celebrated book on counterpoint is Fux's great theoretical work GRADUS AD PARNASSUM. Since its appearance in 1725, it has been used by and has directly influenced the work of many of the great composers, including J.S. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven. Originally written in Latin, this work has been translated in to the principal European languages. The present translation by Alfred Mann is the first faithful rendering in English, presenting the essence of Fux's teachings.

Bach Perspectives, Volume 12

Bach Perspectives, Volume 12 PDF Author: Robin A. Leaver
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050711
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang many of the same vernacular hymns. Internal squabbles were rarely missing within Lutheranism, for example Pietists' dislike of concerted church music, especially if it employed specific dance forms. Also investigated here are broader issues such as the close affinity between Bach's cantata libretti and the hymns of Charles Wesley; and Bach's music in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment as shaped by Protestant Rationalism in Berlin. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Joyce L. Irwin, Robin A. Leaver, Mark Noll, Markus Rathey, Derek Stauff, and Janice B. Stockigt.

Bach Counterpoint

Bach Counterpoint PDF Author: Martin Lohse
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
'Bach Counterpoint - Two-part invention' is a textbook in two volumes. The aim of this book is to explain Bach's compositional methods in an accessible manner, using methods and tools specially developed for this purpose. The two-part Bach inventions are a natural starting point, and have certain clear advantages when used to illustrate Baroque contrapuntal composition; it is in two parts, its form is clear, and it contains the same compositional techniques as the fugue, such as countermelody/counterpoint, sequences and motivic development. The book develops a method of understanding and composing inventions, based on a throrough analysis and exploration of Bach's inventions. To illustrate the progression and stringency of this method, this book has been structured as an insight into the 'compositional workshop'. Through analyses and music examples, the process of creation is illustrated, and throughout the book, how and why musical decisions are made are explained. Volume I will mainly focus on the first section of the form, up to the entry of the theme in the dominant or tonic parallel tonality. While relatively short, this willprove sufficient in introducing Bach's music. The exercises in this volume include writing counterpoint to a given melody, composing a longer sequence that concludes in a cadence in the new tonality, and will also cover topics such as melodic development, rhythm, and the treatment of dissonance in the style of Bach. In Volume II, instruction in compositional development continues with the analysis and composition of complete inventions, including the first section of the form, which is covered in this volume. In this second edition, minor errors and omissions have been corrected, and the section on mediant chords has been rewritten.

Mendelssohn's Musical Education

Mendelssohn's Musical Education PDF Author: R. Larry Todd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521246552
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book is a study and critical edition of Mendelssohn's composition exercise book from his early period of study with Carl Friedrich Zelter (1819-1821). The workbook illustrates in considerable detail the young musician's struggle to master the rules of part writing and principles of counterpoint. Much of Zelter's systematic teaching method is grounded in the eighteenth-century theoretical tradition of Berlin; not surprisingly, the exercises bear the stamp of the music of J. S. Bach, which heavily influenced such Berlin musicians as C. P. E. Bach, C. F. C. Fasch, Marpurg, Kirnberger, Zelter and Mendelssohn. There is little doubt that the historicist attitude of the mature Mendelssohn - as seen in his efforts to revive the works of Bach and Handel and in his propensity toward strict contrapuntal techniques in his own music - was conditioned by these studies with Zelter. The publication of the workbook sheds new light on the early development of one ofthe most important nineteenth-century composers who, though affected by the new wave of romanticism that swept over Europe, never lost his respect for the past. No less important, the manuscript includes several previously unpublished pieces which rank among Mendelssohn's earliest compositions.

The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint

The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint PDF Author: Thomas Benjamin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Bach and the Patterns of Invention

Bach and the Patterns of Invention PDF Author: Laurence Dreyfus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067423829X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach's approach to musical invention posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics.

The Study of Fugue

The Study of Fugue PDF Author: Alfred Mann
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486171345
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Features a historical survey of writings on the fugue from the Renaissance to the present as well as four 18th-century studies: works by J. J. Fux, F. W. Marpurg, and more. Includes introductions, commentary, and 255 musical examples.