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Berlioz and His World
A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre an...
The Songs of Fanny Hensel
Fanny Hensel is arguably the most gifted female composer of the nineteenth century, but her music has long been overlooked. The Songs of Fanny Hensel is a groundbreaking collection of new scholarship on Hensel's highly original contributions to the genre of song, the art form that she said "suits her best."
Music in Goethe's Faust
Goethe's Faust, a work which has attracted the attention of composers since the late eighteenth century and played a vital role in the evolution of vocal, operatic and instrumental repertoire in the nineteenth century, hashad a seminal impact in musical realms.
Performing History
The fifteen essays of Performing History glimpse the diverse ways music historians “do” history, and the diverse ways in which music histories matter. This book’s chapters are structured into six key areas: historically informed performance; ethnomusicological perspectives; particular musical works that “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” war histories; operatic works that works that “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” power or enlightenment; musical works that deploy the body and a broad range of senses to convey histories; and histories involving popular music and performance. Diverse lines of evidence and manifold methodologies are represented here, ranging from traditional historical archival research to interviewing, performing, and composing. The modes of analyzing music and its associated texts represented here are as various as the kinds of evidence explored, including, for example, reading historical accounts against other contextual backdrops, and reading “between the lines” to access other voices than those provided by mainstream interpretation or traditional musicology.
Rethinking Mendelssohn
As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may p...
Grand Illusion
A new and groundbreaking approach to the history of grand opera, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores the illusion and illumination behind the form's rise to cultural eminence. Renowned opera scholar Gabriela Cruz argues that grand opera worked to awaken memory and feeling in a way never before experienced in the opera house, asserting that the concept of "spectacle" was the defining cultural apparatus of the art form after the 1820s. Parisian audiences at the Académie Royale de Musique were struck by the novelty and power of grand opera upon the introduction of gaslight illumination, a technological innovation that quickly influenced productions across the We...
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique
Situates Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique within French Romanticism and considers influences, literary as well as musical, that shaped its conception.
Songs in Motion
Qualities of motion and emotion in song come from poetic images, melody, harmony, and voice leading, but they also come from rhythm and meter-the flow and articulation of words and music in time. This book explores rhythm and meter in the nineteenth-century German Lied, including songs for voice and piano by Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. The Lied, as a genre, is characterized especially by the fusion of poetry and music. Poetic meter itself has expressive qualities, and rhythmic variations contribute further to the modes of signification. These features often carry over into songs, even as they are set in the more strictly det...
Embodying Voice
Embodying Voice: Singing Verdi, Singing Wagner articulates the process of developing an operatic voice, explaining how and why the training of such a voice is as complex and sophisticated as it is mysterious. This book illustrates how putting together a voice, embodying a sound, and creating a character are vital to an audience’s emotional involvement and enjoyment. Moreover, it addresses an imbalance of power between the opera director and the orchestra conductor – ultimately, it is the communicative power of the singer’s voice that brings life to an opera, a fact well known by Verdi and Wagner. Embodying Voice highlights the singer’s creative agency to be co-creator of the composer’s music. It explores the ways in which vocal performance is constructed and controlled, connecting layers of mind and bodily engagement that allow operatic singers to achieve expression beyond the text itself. Further reading, listening, and performance lists are provided at the end of each chapter, complemented by musical examples throughout.
Expressive Intersections in Brahms
“This exceptionally fine collection brings together many of the best analysts of Brahms, and nineteenth-century music generally, in the English-speaking world today.” —Nineteenth-Century Music Review Contributors to this exciting volume examine the intersection of structure and meaning in Brahms’s music, utilizing a wide range of approaches, from the theories of Schenker to the most recent analytical techniques. They combine various viewpoints with the semiotic-based approaches of Robert Hatten, and address many of the most important genres in which Brahms composed. The essays reveal the expressive power of a work through the comparison of specific passages in one piece to similar works and through other artistic realms such as literature and painting. The result of this intertextual re-framing is a new awareness of the meaningfulness of even Brahms’s most “absolute” works. “Through its unique combination of historical narrative, expressive content, and technical analytical approaches, the essays in Expressive Intersections in Brahms will have a profound impact on the current scholarly discourse surrounding Brahms analysis.” —Notes
