Music and Decadence in European Modernism

Music and Decadence in European Modernism PDF Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521767571
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.

Music and Decadence in European Modernism

Music and Decadence in European Modernism PDF Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521767571
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.

Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle

Identity, Aesthetics, and Sound in the Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Dariusz Gafijczuk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134492405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most controversial and still culturally relevant personalities of Viennese modernism - Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg - it tells the story of a cultural experiment of unprecedented proportions, an experiment that attempted to redesign the senses and the concept of individual identity. The book describes the shape of this identity through its mutually overlapping artistic and intellectual dimensions, as it explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.

Reification and the Aesthetics of Music

Reification and the Aesthetics of Music PDF Author: Jonathan Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317297970
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.

Forbidden Music

Forbidden Music PDF Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154305
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Offers a study of the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich, and describes the consequences for music around the world.

Nationality vs Universality

Nationality vs Universality PDF Author: Sławomira Żerańska-Kominek
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443887773
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
For the last few decades, historiography, considered as the central discipline of musicology, has explored new directions and sought inspiration for further research, consequently redefining the fundamental premises of historical musicology. This is especially true with regard to the concept of music history as the work of great individuals and the domain of artistic works, resulting from either tradition or new inventions. The validity of global and universal perspectives has been questioned, and researchers have emphasized the need to focus on local realities and day-to-day musical life. Another key topic in this ongoing debate is the (im)possibility of writing an “objective” historical narrative. The methodological foundations of the traditional Western model of music historiography have been deconstructed – a process which has revealed its profound and purely one-sided ideological profile. This publication deals with the history of music as a way of representing historical memory and as an instrument of shaping society’s present. It introduces selected European historiographic concepts created outside the “official” mainstream of Western historiography. The contributions to this volume not only demonstrate the cultural diversity of the conventions in which music history is narrated, but also reveal their ideological and political determinants. As such, the book represents fascinating reading for anyone interested in the mechanisms that shape notions of the musical past, which for many nations in Central and Eastern Europe is also a key element of their identity.

Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg's 'Lulu'

Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg's 'Lulu' PDF Author: Silvio J. dos Santos
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580464831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book explores the crossroads between autobiographical narratives and musical composition in Alban Berg's Lulu, unveiling aspects of encoded social customs, gender identity, and personal experiences within musical structures. Exploring the crossroads between autobiographical narrative and musical composition, this book examines Berg's transformation of Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora -- the plays used in the formationof the libretto for Lulu -- according to notions of gender identity, social customs, and the aesthetics of modernity in the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s. While Berg modernized several aspects of the plays and incorporatedserial techniques of composition from Arnold Schoenberg, he never let go of the idealistic Wagnerian perspectives of his youth. In fact, he went as far as reconfiguring aspects of Richard Wagner's life as an ideal identity to beplayed out in the compositional process. In composing the opera, Berg also reflected on the most important cultural figures in fin-de-siècle Vienna that affected his worldview, including Karl Kraus, Emil Lucka, Otto Weininger, andothers. Combining analysis of Berg's correspondence, numerous sketches for Lulu, and the finished work with interpretive models drawn from cultural studies and philosophy, this book elucidates the ways in which Berg grappled at the end of his life with his self-image as an "incorrigible romantic," and explains aspects of his musical language that have been considered strange or anomalous in Berg scholarship. Silvio J. dos Santos isassistant professor of musicology at the University of Florida.

After Mahler

After Mahler PDF Author: Stephen Downes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107469937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

Demystifying Scriabin

Demystifying Scriabin PDF Author: Kenneth Smith
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276568
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
An innovative contribution to Scriabin studies, covering aspects of Scriabin''s life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, and interaction with contemporary Russian culture.This book is an innovative contribution to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) studies, covering aspects of Scriabin''s life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, as well as his interaction with contemporary Russian culture. It offers new and original research from leading and upcoming Russian music scholars. Key Scriabin topics such as mysticism, philosophy, music theory, contemporary aesthetics, and composition processes are covered. Musical coverage spans the composer''s early, middle and late period. All main repertoire is being discussed: the piano miniatures and sonatas as well as the symphonies. In more detail, chapters consider: Scriabin''s part in early twentieth-century Russia''s cultural climate; how Scriabin moved from early pastiche to a style much more original; the influence of music theory on Scriabin''s idiosyncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin''s writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer''s mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic ''tonal function'' of Scriabin''s late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer''s music.ncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin''s writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer''s mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic ''tonal function'' of Scriabin''s late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer''s music.ncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin''s writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer''s mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic ''tonal function'' of Scriabin''s late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer''s music.ncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin''s writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer''s mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic ''tonal function'' of Scriabin''s late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer''s music. his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer''s mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic ''tonal function'' of Scriabin''s late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer''s music.

Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music

Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music PDF Author: Peter Franklin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520958039
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Why are some of the most beloved and frequently performed works of the late-romantic period—Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini—regarded by many critics as perhaps not quite of the first rank? Why has modernist discourse continued to brand these works as overly sentimental and emotionally self-indulgent? Peter Franklin takes a close and even-handed look at how and why late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex course between modernism and mass culture in the period leading up to the Second World War. The style’s continuing popularity and its domination of the film music idiom (via work by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and their successors) bring late-romantic music to thousands of listeners who have never set foot in a concert hall. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music sheds new light on these often unfairly disparaged works and explores the historical dimension of their continuing role in the contemporary sound world.

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories

Performing Salome, Revealing Stories PDF Author: Clair Rowden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317082273
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
With its first public live performance in Paris on 11 February 1896, Oscar Wilde's Salomé took on female embodied form that signalled the start of 'her' phenomenal journey through the history of the arts in the twentieth century. This volume explores Salome's appropriation and reincarnation across the arts - not just Wilde's heroine, nor Richard Strauss's - but Salome as a cultural icon in fin-de-siècle society, whose appeal for ever new interpretations of the biblical story still endures today. Using Salome as a common starting point, each chapter suggests new ways in which performing bodies reveal alternative stories, narratives and perspectives and offer a range and breadth of source material and theoretical approaches. The first chapter draws on the field of comparative literature to investigate the inter-artistic interpretations of Salome in a period that straddles the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Modernist era. This chapter sets the tone for the rest of the volume, which develops specific case studies dealing with censorship, reception, authorial reputation, appropriation, embodiment and performance. As well as the Viennese premiere of Wilde's play, embodied performances of Salome from the period before the First World War are considered, offering insight into the role and agency of performers in the production and complex negotiation of meaning inherent in the role of Salome. By examining important productions of Strauss's Salome since 1945, and more recent film interpretations of Wilde's play, the last chapters explore performance as a cultural practice that reinscribes and continuously reinvents the ideas, icons, symbols and gestures that shape both the performance itself, its reception and its cultural meaning.