Brahms in the Priesthood of Art - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Brahms in the Priesthood of Art write by Laurie McManus. This book was released on 2021-01-05. Brahms in the Priesthood of Art available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion) and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or "priest of music," with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms's bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could suit the bachelor Brahms but leave the composer open to speculation. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in a more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological framework that questioned the composer's physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art, but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.
Rethinking Brahms
Rethinking Brahms - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Rethinking Brahms write by Nicole Grimes. This book was released on 2022-10-28. Rethinking Brahms available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.
Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music
Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music write by John Michael Cooper. This book was released on 2024-02-12. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Library Journal praises the book as "an excellent one-volume ready reference resource for students, researchers, and others interested in music history." Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition covers the persons, ideas, practices, and works that made up the worlds of Western music during the long 19th century (ca. 1780–1918). It’s the first book to recognize that Romantic music was very nearly a global phenomenon. It includes more women, more Black musicians and other musicians of color, and more exponents of musical Romanticism from Central and South America as well as Central and Eastern Europe than any other single-volume study of Romantic music—thus challenging the conventional hegemony of musical Romanticisms by men and by Western European nations. This book includes entries on topics including anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism that were pervasive and defining to the worlds of musical Romanticism but are rarely addressed in general studies of that subject. It includes Romantic musicians who were not primarily composers, as well as topics such as the Haitian Revolution, spirituals, and ragtime that were more important for music in the long 19th century than is generally acknowledged. The result is an expansive, inclusive, diverse, and more richly textured portrayal of Romantic music than is elsewhere available. Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, an extensive bibliography, and a dictionary section with more than 600 cross-referenced entries on traditions, famous pieces, persons, places, technical terms, and institutions of Romantic music. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic music.
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Johannes Brahms write by Jan Swafford. This book was released on 2012-01-11. Johannes Brahms available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. An illuminating new biography of one of the most beloved of all composers, published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, brilliantly written by a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. Johannes Brahms has consistently eluded his biographers. Throughout his life, he attempted to erase traces of himself, wanting his music to be his sole legacy. Now, in this masterful book, Jan Swafford, critically acclaimed as both biographer and composer, takes a fresh look at Brahms, giving us for the first time a fully realized portrait of the man who created the magnificent music. Brahms was a man with many friends and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifetime. Yet he lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world. The Brahms that emerges from these pages is not the bearded eminence of previous biographies but rather a fascinating assemblage of contradictions. Brought up in poverty, he was forced to play the piano in the brothels of Hamburg, where he met with both mental and physical abuse. At the same time, he was the golden boy of his teachers, who found themselves in awe of a stupendous talent: a miraculous young composer and pianist, poised between the emotionalism of the Romantics and the rigors of the composers he worshipped--Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. In 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the twenty-year-old Brahms the savior of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his days trying to live up to that prophecy, ever fearful of proving unworthy of his musical inheritance. We find here more of Brahms's words, his daily life and joys and sorrows, than in any other biography. With novelistic grace, Swafford shows us a warm-blooded but guarded genius who hid behind jokes and prickliness, rudeness and intractability with his friends as well as his enemies, but who was also a witty drinking companion and a consummate careerist skillfully courting the powerful. This is a book rich in secondary characters as well, including Robert Schumann, declining into madness as he hailed the advent of a new genius; Clara Schumann, the towering pianist, tormented personality, and great love of Brahms's life; Josef Joachim, the brilliant, self-lacerating violinist; the extraordinary musical amateur Elisabet von Herzogenberg, on whose exacting criticism Brahms relied; Brahms's rival and shadow, the malevolent genius Richard Wagner; and Eduard Hanslick, enemy of Wagner and apostle of Brahms, at once the most powerful and most wrongheaded music critic of his time. Among the characters in the book are two great cities: the stolid North German harbor town of Hamburg where Johannes grew up, which later spurned him; and glittering, fickle, music-mad Vienna, where Brahms the self-proclaimed vagabond finally settled, to find his sweetest triumphs and his most bitter failures. Unique to this book is the way in which musical scholarship and biography are combined: in a style refreshingly free of pretentiousness, Jan Swafford takes us deep into the music--from the grandeur of the First Symphony and the intricacies of the chamber work to the sorrow of the German Requiem--allowing us to hear these familiar works in new and often surprising ways. This is a clear-eyed study of a remarkable man and a vivid portrait of an era in transition. Ultimately, Johannes Brahms is the story of a great, backward-looking artist who inspired musical revolutionaries of the following generations, yet who was no less a prophet of the darkness and violence of our century. A biographical masterpiece at once wholly original and definitive.
Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments
Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments write by Rachel N. Becker. This book was released on 2024-03-29. Valuing Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Fantasias for Woodwind Instruments available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book approaches opera fantasias – instrumental works that use themes from a single opera as the body of their virtuosic and flamboyant material – both historically and theoretically, concentrating on compositions for and by woodwind-instrument performers in Italy in the nineteenth century. Important overlapping strands include the concept of virtuosity and its gradual demonization, the strong gendered overtones of individual woodwind instruments and of virtuosity, the distinct Italian context of these fantasias, the presentation and alteration of opera narratives in opera fantasias, and the technical and social development of woodwind instruments. Like opera itself, the opera fantasia is a popular art form, stylistically predictable yet formally flexible, based heavily on past operatic tradition and prefabricated materials. Through archival research in Italy, theoretical analysis, and exploration of European cultural contexts, this book clarifies a genre that has been consciously stifled and societal resonances that still impact music reception and performance today.
