Reviews of Recent Textbooks in Theory and Musicianship. 4. Harmony Harmony and Voice Leading Edward Aldwell Carl Schachter Music in Theory and Practice Bruce Benward Gary White Tonal Harmony, with an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music Stefan Kostka Dorothy Payne Harmony Walter Piston The Shaping of Musical Elements Armand Russell Allen Trubitt Harmony: Patterns and Principles Allen Winold

1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-266
Author(s):  
Roger Graybill
2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 275-299
Author(s):  
Yi-Cheng Daniel Wu

Abstract In tonal music, pitch orthography reflects different structural and functional meanings of notes in various contextual and textural settings such as harmony, melody, and voice leading. At the turn of the twentieth century, many composers attempt to progress beyond the confines of traditional tonality, whose works, as generally perceived by most analysts nowadays, treat the twelve chromatic notes as the twelve enharmonically equivalent pitch-classes and thus present “the dissolution of … [the] notational conventions of earlier times” (Gillies 1993, 43). Contrary to this general sentiment regarding orthography, the present paper brings the significance of pitch notation into sharper focus by investigating its crucial role in the course of the text setting and form in Webern's op. 12, no. 2. I will demonstrate how Webern utilizes orthography to reinforce the structure of the text and the narrative of form, assisting the analyst in considering notation as a core element while examining the pitch structure of the early twentieth-century music.


Author(s):  
Adrian Daub

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.


Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guangxu Zhao

Abstract For some Western translators before the twentieth century, domestication was their strategy to translate the classical Chinese poetry into English. But the consequence of this strategy was the sacrifice of the ideogrammic nature of these poems. The translators in the twentieth century, especially the Imagist poets and translators in the 1930s, overcame the problems of their predecessors and their translation theory and practice was close to that of the contemporary semiotic translators. But both Imagist translators and contemporary semiotic translators have the problem of indifference to the feeling of the original in their translations. For the problem of translating the classical Chinese poetry by the Westerners before the twentieth century and the Imagist poets and translators of the twentieth century, see Zhao and Flotow 2018. This paper attempts to set up an aesthetic-semiotic approach to the translation of the iconicity of classical Chinese poetry on the basis of the examination of both Eastern and Western translation studies.


1971 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-123
Author(s):  
Henry Leland Clarke

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