The concept of topics was introduced into the vocabulary of music scholars by Leonard Ratner to account for cross-references between eighteenth-century styles and genres. The emergence of this phenomenon followed the rapid proliferation and consolidation of stylistic and generic categories. While music theorists and critics classified styles and genres, defining their affects and proper contexts for their usage, composers crossed the boundaries between them, using stylistic conventions as means of communication with the audience. Such topical use of styles and genres out of their proper contexts and their mixtures with other styles and genres became the hallmark of South-German instrumental music, which engulfed the so-called Viennese Classicism. Since this music did not develop its own aesthetics and, in its days, received no adequate critical appraisal, topic theory developed from Ratner’s seminal insight by Wye J. Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, Robert Hatten, Raymond Monelle, and others can be considered a theory of this music, andThe Oxford Handbook of Topic Theorygoes some way toward reconstructing its aesthetic underpinnings. The volume grounds the concept of topics in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism; documents historical reality of individual topics on the basis of eighteenth-century sources, traces the origins of topical mixtures to transformations of eighteenth-century musical life, and relates topical analysis to other kinds of music analysis conducted from the perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners. It lays the foundation under further investigation of musical topics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
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