- Bach and the Patterns of Invention
- Laurence Dreyfus
- 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.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2004
- Motives for Allusion
- Christopher Alan Reynolds
- When a critic pointed out to Brahms that the finale theme in his First Symphony was remarkably similar to the Ode to Joy theme in Beethoven's Ninth, he is said to have replied: "Yes indeed, and what's really remarkable is that every jackass notices this at once." Not every musical borrowing is quite so obvious; but the listener who does perceive one is always left wondering: what does the similarity mean? In this illuminating book Christopher Reynolds gives us answers to that complex question. He identifies specific borrowings or allusions in a wide range of nineteenth-century music and shows the kinds of things composers do with borrowed musical ideas.
- Hardcover 2003
- Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity
- Edited by Karol Berger
- Edited by Anthony Newcomb
- For most music historians, the modernism of the twentieth century was until recently the only appearance of the "modern" in music. The widely perceived recent decline of musical modernism makes it now possible to see the modernism of the twentieth century as a chapter in a much longer story. The principal purpose of the present book is to encourage a debate over musical modernity; a debate that would consider the question whether an examination of the history of European art music may enrich our picture of modernity and whether our understanding of music's development may be transformed by insights into the nature of modernity provided by other historical disciplines.
- Hardcover 2005
- Performing Rites
- Simon Frith
- In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Remembering the Future
- Luciano Berio
- In Remembering the Future Luciano Berio shares with us some musical experiences that "invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory." His scintillating meditation on music and the ways of experiencing it reflects the composer's profound understanding of the history and contemporary practice of his art. Berio's tone is conversational, often playful, punctuated by arresting aphorisms.
- Hardcover 2006
- Robert Schumann
- Jon W. Finson
- Arguably no other nineteenth-century German composer was as literate or as finely attuned to setting verse as Robert Schumann. Finson challenges long-standing assumptions about Schumann's Lieder, engaging traditionally held interpretations. Arranged in part thematically, rather than merely by strict compositional chronology, this book speaks to the heart of Schumann's music.
- Hardcover 2008