Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-288
Author(s):  
Harry White
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Late Works

The conclusion to this book revisits the work-concept in the light of the arguments represented here in relation to servitude and autonomy as underlying agents in a continuous axis of musical thought. It is this axis that conjoins Fux, Bach, and Handel. The servility of Fux’s musical discourse consequently gains in historical understanding and significance, and so too does the imaginative autonomy discerned in the late works of Bach and Handel. The nature of the European musical imagination in the first half of the eighteenth century is thereby more sharply defined

The Musical Discourse of Servitude

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry White
Keyword(s):  
Johann Sebastian Bach ◽  
George Frideric Handel ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Church Service ◽  
Late Works

The Musical Discourse of Servitude examines the music of Johann Joseph Fux (ca. 1660–1741) in relation to that of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Its principal argument is that Fux’s long indenture as a composer of church music in Vienna gains in meaning (and cultural significance) when situated along an axis that runs between the liturgical servitude of writing music for the imperial court service and the autonomy of musical imagination which transpires in the late works of Bach and Handel. To this end, The Musical Discourse of Servitude constructs a typology of the late Baroque musical imagination which draws Fux, Bach, and Handel into the orbit of North Italian compositional practice. This typology depends on two primary concepts, both of which derive and dissent from Lydia Goehr’s formulation of the “work-concept” in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), namely, the “authority concept” and a revised reading of the “work-concept” itself. Both concepts are engaged through the agency of two musical genres—the oratorio and the Mass ordinary—which Fux shared with Handel and Bach respectively. These genres functioned as conservative norms in Fux’s music (most of Fux’s working life was spent in writing for the church service), but they are very differently engaged by Bach and Handel. To establish a continuity between Fux, Bach and Handel, and between the servitude of common practice and the emerging autonomy of a work-based practice in the early eighteenth-century musical imagination are the principal objectives of this study.

Haydn, meter, and listening in transition

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Grant
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Late Works ◽  
The Way

In recent years, music theorists and analysts have devoted a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of hypermeter, drawing some of their most representative examples from the late works of Haydn. Although this recent trend in analysis has shed much light on Haydn’s music, it has left questions of history distinct from the mode of listening it engages. This article argues that the way we understand conceptualizations of listening and aesthetic experience can greatly inform the way that we understand hypermeter and the question of style in history. Drawing on eighteenth-century theories of music and literature, it recontextualizes Haydn’s hypermetric style with respect to a larger world of aesthetic experience.

BLAINVILLE'S NEW MODE, OR HOW THE PLAGAL CADENCE CAME TO BE ‘PLAGAL’

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
CALEB MUTCH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mixed Mode ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
And Function ◽  
Mode A ◽  
As If

ABSTRACTThe plagal cadence has long been a significant concept within musical discourse, but that discourse contains no convincing explanation of why the progression should be characterized as ‘plagal’. This article elucidates the meaning of the term ‘plagal cadence’ by examining its introduction into a mid-eighteenth-century Parisian debate over the nature of what would come to be called tonality instigated by Charles-Henri de Blainville's proposal of the ‘mixed mode’, a supplement to the major and minor modes. Owing to the properties of his new mode's scale, which corresponds to the Phrygian mode, Blainville identified the plagal cadence as the proper conclusion for pieces in the mixed mode. Curiously, although Blainville's work appears to contain the first published articulation of the term, he employs it as if his readers were already familiar with the ‘plagal cadence’. This article explains that oddity, finding that Blainville misread earlier accounts of plainchant as saying that plagal modes were characterized by the interval of the descending fourth. In conclusion, consideration of the controversy regarding the mixed mode and plagal cadence reveals that those historical disagreements bear striking similarities to current debates over the significance and function of the plagal cadence in theories of harmony.

scholarly journals Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evan Bonds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Aesthetic Principle

The growing aesthetic prestige of instrumental music in the last decades of the eighteenth century was driven not so much by changes in the musical repertory as by the resurgence of idealism as an aesthetic principle applicable to all the arts. This new outlook, as articulated by such writers as Winckelmann, Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Herder, Fichte, and Schelling, posited the work of art as a reflection of an abstract ideal, rather than as a means by which a beholder could be moved. Through idealism, the work of art became a vehicle by which to sense the realm of the spiritual and the infinite, and the inherently abstract nature of instrumental music allowed this art to offer a particularly powerful glimpse of that realm. Idealism thus provided the essential framework for the revaluation of instrumental music in the writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others around the turn of the century. While this new approach to instrumental music has certain points of similarity with the later concept of "absolute" music, it is significant that Eduard Hanslick expunged several key passages advocating idealist thought when he revised both the first and second editions of his treatise Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. The concept of "absolute" music, although real enough in the mid-nineteenth century, is fundamentally anachronistic when applied to the musical thought and works of the decades around 1800.

‘For whom the bell tolls’: Listening and its Implications

2010 ◽  
Vol 135 (S1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
David R. M. Irving
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Music ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Alternative Set

ABSTRACTThis response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Shakespearean Ballads in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Transition from Oral Songs to Printed Historical Documents

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-125
Author(s):  
Minoru Mihara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Vocal Performance ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
Transitional Phase ◽  
Printed Sources

Thomas Percy’s ballad collection, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, marks a point of intersection between balladry and Shakespeareana, which both went through a transitional phase from vocal performance to literary undertaking in the eighteenth century. In the Reliques, ballads that had been orally transmitted by minstrels were changed into validated printed sources for a scholarly project. This transition helped eighteenth-century editors gain a historical understanding of Shakespeare and emend his traditionally received texts. These editors were persuaded to use the ballads in the Reliques as reliable sources for their emendation since they were printed as authoritative documents that were useful for their academic editions of Shakespeare. They gained easy textual access to the printed ballads in the Reliques to search for contextual or emendatory materials. A comparison of four Shakespeare-related ballads in the Reliques (“King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,” “Take Thy Old Cloak about Thee,” “Willow, Willow, Willow,” and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”) to their counterparts in editions of Shakespeare reveals that the ballads that were printed as historical documents in the Reliques advanced the editors’ contextual illustration of Shakespeare and that they authorized the emendation of the textus receptus. This article focuses on the effect of the historical information provided by Percy’s printed ballads on George Steevens’s and Edmond Malone’s contextualization of Shakespeare and on their emendation of Shakespearean texts. In addition, it concentrates on the possibility that Edward Capell referred to Shakespearean ballads in Percy’s Reliques combined with old Quarto editions of Shakespeare’s works.

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