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Bach And The Meanings Of Counterpoint
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Book Synopsis Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint by : David Yearsley
Download or read book Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint written by David Yearsley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Bach and the Patterns of Invention by : Laurence Dreyfus
Download or read book Bach and the Patterns of Invention written by Laurence Dreyfus and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 such as Vivaldi and Telemann, Laurence Dreyfus explains how Bach’s approach to musical invention in a variety of genres posed a fundamental challenge to Baroque aesthetics. “Invention”—the word Bach and his contemporaries used for the musical idea that is behind or that generates a composition—emerges as an invaluable key in Dreyfus’s analysis. Looking at important pieces in a range of genres, including concertos, sonatas, fugues, and vocal works, he focuses on the fascinating construction of the invention, the core musical subject, and then shows how Bach disposes, elaborates, and decorates it in structuring his composition. Bach and the Patterns of Invention brings us fresh understanding of Bach’s working methods, and how they differed from those of the other leading composers of his day. We also learn here about Bach’s unusual appropriations of French and Italian styles—and about the elevation of various genres far above their conventional status. Challenging the restrictive lenses commonly encountered in both historical musicology and theoretical analysis, Dreyfus provocatively suggests an approach to Bach that understands him as an eighteenth-century thinker and at the same time as a composer whose music continues to speak to us today.
Book Synopsis Sex, Death, and Minuets by : David Yearsley
Download or read book Sex, Death, and Minuets written by David Yearsley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Insightful commentary on the Bach family’s musical life and . . . the culture in which the Bachs lived. . . . Important and fascinating . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history’s most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music—long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening—has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity. Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a historical subject—at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow. David Yearsley explores the notebooks’ entries against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying. “Fascinating.” —Laurence Dreyfus, University of Oxford “Yearsley’s account . . . will doubtless stand as the definitive account of the ‘Bachin’ and her notebooks for years to come.” —Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge “A warm, insightful, and compelling portrait.” —Matthew Dirst, University of Houston
Download or read book Bach's Feet written by David Yearsley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yearsley explores the cultural significance of making music with hands and feet, a mode of performance unique to the organ.
Book Synopsis Bach's Well-tempered Clavier by : David Ledbetter
Download or read book Bach's Well-tempered Clavier written by David Ledbetter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bach's Well-tempered Clavier (or the 48 Preludes and Fugues) stands at the core of baroque keyboard music and has been a model and inspiration for performers and composers ever since it was written. This invaluable guide to the 96 pieces explains Bach's various purposes in compiling the music, describes the rich traditions on which he drew, and provides commentaries for each prelude and fugue. In his text, David Ledbetter addresses the main focal points mentioned by Bach in his original 1722 title page. Drawing on Bach literature over the past three hundred years, he explores German traditions of composition types and Bach's novel expansion of them; explains Bach's instruments and innovations in keyboard technique in the general context of early eighteenth-century developments; reviews instructive and theoretical literature relating to keyboard temperaments from 1680 to 1750; and discusses Bach's pedagogical intent when composing the Well-tempered Clavier. Ledbetter's commentaries on individual preludes and fugues equip readers with the concepts necessary to make their own assessment and include information about the sources when details of notation, ornaments, and fingerings have a bearing on performance.
Download or read book Bach & God written by Michael Marissen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach's vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach's pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work's plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach's vocal repertory, the music puts a "spin" on the words in a way that turns out to be explainable as orthodox Lutheran in its orientation. In a few of Bach's vocal works, his otherwise puzzlingly fierce musical settings serve to underscore now unrecognized or unacknowledged verbal polemics, most unsettlingly so in the case of his church cantatas that express contempt for Jews and Judaism. Finally, even Bach's secular instrumental music, particularly the late collections of "abstract" learned counterpoint, can powerfully project certain elements of traditional Lutheran theology. Bach's music is inexhaustible, and Bach & God suggests that through close contextual study there is always more to discover and learn.
Book Synopsis Musical Models of Democracy by : Robert Adlington
Download or read book Musical Models of Democracy written by Robert Adlington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the textural relationships inscribed into musical scores, as in the case of Elliott Carter's 'polyvocal' compositions. Pioneers of musical indeterminacy sought to democratise the relationship between composer and performers by leaving open key decisions about the realisation of a work. Musicians have involved audiences in active participation to liberate them from the passivity of spectatorship. Free improvisation groups have experimented with new kinds of egalitarian relationships between performers to reject old hierarchies. In examining these different approaches, Adlington illuminates the achievements and ambiguities of musical models of democracy. As a result, this book not only offers an important new perspective on modern musicians' engagement with a central political idea of the past century, but it also encourages a deeper and more critical engagement with the idea of democracy within present-day musical life.
Book Synopsis Resonant Witness by : Jeremy S. Begbie
Download or read book Resonant Witness written by Jeremy S. Begbie and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-10 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resonant Witness gathers together a wide, harmonious chorus of voices from across the musical and theological spectrum to show that music and theology can each learn much from the other and that the majesty and power of both are profoundly amplified when they do. With essays touching on J. S. Bach, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Olivier Messiaen, jazz improvisation, South African freedom songs, and more, this volume encourages musicians and theologians to pursue a more fruitful and sustained engagement with one another. What can theology do for music? Resonant Witness helps answer this question with an essential resource in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of music and theology. Covering an impressively wide range of musical topics, from cosmos to culture and theology to worship, Jeremy Begbie and Steven Guthrie explore and map new territory with incisive contributions from the very best musicians, theologians, and philosophers. Bennett Zon Durham University This volume represents a burst of cross-disciplinary energy and insight that can be celebrated by musicians and theologians, music-lovers and God-lovers alike. John D. Witvliet (from afterword)
Book Synopsis Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Studies by : Annette Richards
Download or read book Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Studies written by Annette Richards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the latest work by distinguished scholars on C. P. E. Bach.
Book Synopsis Dieterich Buxtehude by : Kerala J. Snyder
Download or read book Dieterich Buxtehude written by Kerala J. Snyder and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening, revised edition of the definitive biography on celebrated organist and composer, Dieterich Buxtehude. This book is a new edition of the most comprehensive life-and-works study of the great Baroque-era organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707), released to celebrate the tercentenary of the composer's death. Originally published in 1987 and long out of print, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck is considered by most musicologists to be the definitive biography. It also includes close description of Buxtehude's compositional output, from trio sonatas to the famed Abendmusiken: Buxtehude's yearly oratorio presentations. The young J. S. Bach traveled to Lübeck on foot in 1705 to learn as much as he could from the great master of the organ and of Lutheranchurch music. The revised edition contains new information on the organs that Buxtehude played in Scandinavia and Lübeck, excerpts from the newly available account books from St. Mary's in Lübeck, a discussion of newly discovered sources, including one written by J. S. Bach, an evaluation of recent scholarship on Buxtehude, and an extensive bibliography. Written for both the casual reader and the serious scholar. The accompanying music CD (this material is now provided on a companion website) provides examples of all genres discussed in the book -- vocal works, a trio sonata, harpsichord music, and organ music newly recorded on the North German meantone organ in Gothenburg, Sweden, by a noted specialist in this repertoire, Hans Davidsson, who is professor of organ at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and the founder of the Göteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt). Kerala J.Snyder is Professor Emerita of Musicology, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester).
Book Synopsis The Musical Discourse of Servitude by : Harry White
Download or read book The Musical Discourse of Servitude written by Harry White and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining, for the first time, the compositions of Johann Joseph Fux in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel, The Musical Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of the late baroque musical imagination. Author Harry White contrasts musical "servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly the hegemonic flowering of North Italian partimento method across Europe. In contrast, both Bach and Handel represented an autonomy of musical discourse, with Bach exhausting generic models in the mass and Handel inventing a new genre in the oratorio. A potent critique of Lydia Goehr's seminal The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The Musical Discourse of Servitude draws on Goehr's formulation of the "work-concept" as an imaginary construct which, according to Goehr, is an invention of nineteenth-century reception history. White locates this concept as a defining agent of automony in Bach's late works, and contextualized the "work-concept" itself by exploring rival concepts of political, religious, and musical authority which define the European musical imagination in the first half of the eighteenth century. A major revisionist statement about the musical imagination in Western art music, The Musical Discourse of Servitude will be of interest to scholars of the Baroque, particularly of Bach and Handel.
Download or read book Bach's Numbers written by Ruth Tatlow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century Germany the universal harmony of God's creation and the perfection of its proportions still held philosophical, moral and devotional significance. Reproducing proportions close to the unity (1:1) across compositions could render them beautiful, perfect and even eternal. Using the principles of her groundbreaking theory of proportional parallelism and the latest source study research, Ruth Tatlow reveals how Bach used the number of bars to create numerical perfection across his published collections, and explains why he did so. The first part of the book illustrates the wide-ranging application of belief in the unity, showing how planning a well-proportioned structure was a normal compositional procedure in Bach's time. In the second part Tatlow presents practical demonstrations of this in Bach's works, illustrating the layers of proportion that appear within a movement, a work, between two works in a collection, across a collection and between collections.
Book Synopsis Music and the Politics of Negation by : James R. Currie
Download or read book Music and the Politics of Negation written by James R. Currie and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-23 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past quarter century, music studies in the academy have their postmodern credentials by insisting that our scholarly engagements start and end by placing music firmly within its various historical and social contexts. In Music and the Politics of Negation, James R. Currie sets out to disturb the validity of this now quite orthodox claim. Alternating dialectically between analytic and historical investigations into the late 18th century and the present, he poses a set of uncomfortable questions regarding the limits and complicities of the values that the academy keeps in circulation by means of its musical encounters. His overriding thesis is that the forces that have formed us are not our fate.
Download or read book Bach written by David Schulenberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bach has remained a figure of continuous fascination and interest to scholars and readers since the original Master Musicians Bach volume's publication in 1983 - even since its revision in 2000, understanding of Bach and his music's historical and cultural context has shifted substantially. Reflecting new biographical information that has only emerged in recent decades, author David Schulenberg contributes to an ongoing scholarly conversation about Bach with clarity and concision. Bach traces the man's emergence as a startlingly original organist and composer, describing his creative evolution, professional career, and family life from contemporary societal and cultural perspectives in early modern Europe. His experiences as student, music director, and teacher are examined alongside the music he produced in each of these roles, including early compositions for keyboard instruments, the great organ and harpsichord works of later years, vocal music, and other famous instrumental works, including the Brandenburg Concertos. Schulenberg also illuminates how Bach incorporated his contemporary environment into his work: he responded to music by other composers, to his audiences and employment conditions, and to developments in poetry, theology, and even the sciences. The author focuses on Bach's evolution as a composer by ultimately recognizing "Bach's world" in the specific cities, courts, and environments within and for which he composed. Dispensing with biographical minutiae and more closely examining the interplay between his life and his music, Bach presents a unique, grounded, and refreshing new framing of a brilliant composer.
Book Synopsis The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach by : Andre Pirro
Download or read book The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach written by Andre Pirro and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Aesthetic of Johann Sebastian Bach (L’Esthéthique de Jean-Sébastien Bach), by the celebrated French musicologist André Pirro (1869‒1943), was originally published in 1907 and reissued in 1973. It is offered here for the first time in English, as translated by Joe Armstrong. Pirro’s work is based primarily on an examination of the close relationships between language and music in Bach’s vocal works and provides us with an extensive and well-researched “lexicon” of the expressive resources of Bach and his contemporaries. Pirro’s study thus serves as a still sound basis for understanding and interpreting Bach’s instrumental works. Pirro’s engaging analysis that has informed and even moved discerning readers for more than a century. This translation introduces his work to a new audience of performers, music teachers and their students, composers, musicologists, and all who wish to have a greater understanding of the expressive import of Bach’s music.
Book Synopsis The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach by : Robin Leaver
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach written by Robin Leaver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ashgate Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach provides an indispensable introduction to the Bach research of the past thirty-fifty years. It is not a lexicon providing information on all the major aspects of Bach's life and work, such as the Oxford Composer Companion: J. S. Bach. Nor is it an entry-level research tool aimed at those making a beginning of such studies. The valuable essays presented here are designed for the next level of Bach research and are aimed at masters and doctoral students, as well as others interested in coming to terms with the current state of Bach research. Each author covers three aspects within their specific subject area; firstly, to describe the results of research over the past thirty-fifty years, concentrating on the most significant and controversial, such as: the debate over Smend's NBA edition of the B minor Mass; Blume's conclusions with regard to Bach's religion in the wake of the 'new' chronology; Rifkin's one-to-a-vocal-part interpretation; the rediscovery of the Berlin Singakademie manuscripts in Kiev; the discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts and documents and the re-evaluation of previously known sources. Secondly, each author provides a critical analysis of current research being undertaken that is exploring new aspects, reinterpreting earlier assumptions, and/or opening-up new methodologies. For example, Martin W. B. Jarvis has suggested that Anna Magdalena Bach composed the cello suites and contributed to other works of her husband - another controversial hypothesis, whose newly proposed forensic methodology requires investigation. On the other hand, research into Bach's knowledge of the Lutheran chorale tradition is currently underway, which is likely to shed more light on the composer's choices and usage of this tradition. Thirdly, each author identifies areas that are still in need of investigation and research.
Book Synopsis Mapping Musical Signification by : Joan Grimalt
Download or read book Mapping Musical Signification written by Joan Grimalt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-23 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a unique attempt to systematize the latest research on all that music connotes. Musicological reflections on musically expressive content have been pursued for some decades now, in spite of the formalist prejudices that can still hindermusicians and music lovers. The author organizes this body of research so that both professionals and everyday listeners can benefit from it – in plain English, but without giving up the level of depth required by the subject matter. Two criteria have guided his choice among the many ways to speak about musical meaning: its relevance to performance, and its suitability to the teaching context. The legacy of the so-called art music, without an interpretive approach that links ancient traditions to our present, runs the risk of missing the link to the new generations of musicians and listeners. Complementing the theoretical, systematic content, each chapter includes a wealth of examples, including the so-called popular music.
