scholarly journals Multi-Strand Musical Narratives

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Ofcarcik
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Model Analysis ◽  
Slow Movement ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Musical Narrative ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Musical Works

Multiplot forms as described by Garrett (1980) provide a promising route of approach for analysts addressing complex musical works. Although originally developed from a study of Victorian fiction, these forms can also illuminate music, particularly when paired with Booker's (2006) list of seven basic plot types. In this article, I present a model analysis of multiplot musical narrative through an analysis of the finale of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A-flat major, op. 110, as well as two other Beethoven works: the “Cavatina” from the String Quartet in B-flat major, op. 130, and the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony.

THE UNDISCOVERED FLIGHT PATHS OF THE ‘MUSICAL BEE’: NEW LIGHT ON HUMMEL’S MUSICAL QUOTATIONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROHAN STEWART-MACDONALD
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
Explicit Reference ◽  
North Germany ◽  
Goldberg Variations ◽  
The Relationship

Hummel’s quoting of music by other composers has been mentioned briefly in a number of studies. While some of these quotations are explicit, others are a good deal more problematic. This article investigates explicit quotations that appear in two of Hummel’s string quartets dating from 1803–1804 and the finale of a piano sonata from 1807. The fourth movement of the String Quartet in G major, Op. 30 No. 2, twice quotes J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV988, the slow movement of Op. 30 No. 3 refers to Handel’s Messiah and the finale of the F minor piano sonata cultivates a complex relationship with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. My objective is to demonstrate the sophistication and subtlety with which Hummel manipulates the quoted material in these three cases.Hummel’s obvious quotation of Bach and Handel in particular is related to a multi-faceted preoccupation with archaic styles and earlier works that had taken root in the later eighteenth century and that continued to expand into the nineteenth and beyond. Although England was the first nation to develop a performance tradition around the ‘ancient’ musical repertory, it was the accumulation of a didactic tradition around the keyboard works of J. S. Bach in north Germany and its steady migration to centres like Vienna that is of more direct relevance here. And when one surveys the (supposed) quotations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi of works by Bach and Handel and compares them with Hummel’s, Hummel’s remain outstanding in their exactness and also in their frequent lightheartedness of tone. Whereas many straightforward quotations or instances of modelling appear reverential or seek to exalt the basic idiom, Hummel’s either are humorous or seem calculated to reduce the potency of the original in order to assimilate the earlier idiom into the later one. The three pieces considered here illustrate the spectrum of techniques used by Hummel to manipulate quoted material in his works. The quotations in the two quartets have drawn very little comment; the references to Mozart’s ’Jupiter’ Symphony in the finale of Op. 20 have been remarked on more frequently, but the relationship between the two finales is a good deal more intricate than has previously been shown. The ‘contrapuntal deconstruction’ that takes place late in the third movement of Hummel’s Op. 20, between the most explicit reference to the ‘Jupiter’ finale and the coda, is lighthearted in character – amusing, even – and is in some ways the most ingenious and vibrant episode in the movement.

Berthold Goldschmidt: String Quartet; Piano Sonata; Clarinet Quartet

1992 ◽  
Vol 133 (1797) ◽  
pp. 588
Author(s):  
Eric Roseberry ◽  
Mandelring Quartet ◽  
Ib Hausmann ◽  
Kolja Lessing
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Piano Sonata

Stravinsky’s Aesthetics of Disability

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph N. Straus
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Mobility Impairment ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Musical Works

The central features of Stravinsky’s musical style, including its formal splinteredness, its harmonic immobility, its stratification into contrasting textural layers, and its radical simplification of musical materials, can be understood as ways of representing and narrating disability, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, and idiocy. These representations sometimes perpetuate pernicious eugenic-era stereotypes and sometimes are more accepting, even celebratory, of extraordinary bodies. This chapter offers a close look at three musical works from Stravinsky’s early “Russian” period, with particular attention to a few selected passages: the “Russian Dance” from Petrushka (1911), the “Dance of the Young Girls” from the Rite of Spring (1913), and the second of the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914).

Beethoven Translating Shakespeare: Dramatic Models for the Slow Movement of the String Quartet Op. 18, No. 1

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 795-838
Author(s):  
Steven M. Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
French Language ◽  
Slow Movement ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
Theatrical Adaptation

According to a footnote in a treatise on music aesthetics of 1856, Beethoven claimed to have had in mind the scene in the burial vault in Romeo and Juliet when he composed the Adagio of op. 18, no. 1. The Shakespeare connection has persisted because, as scholars since Nottebohm have noticed, it is supported by four (French-language) inscriptions in Beethoven's sketches. We ought to ask, however, Which version of the vault scene—that is, which Romeo and Juliet? As a consequence of eighteenth-century practices of theatrical adaptation, the play was available in various forms. Among contemporary French sources, Steibelt's opera (1793) may be ruled out as a model. Jean-François Ducis's adaptation (1772) shows striking concordances with the sketchbook inscriptions, but we have no direct evidence that Beethoven knew it. He arguably knew three different stage versions—all unlikely models: Weiße's bourgeois tragedy (1767) rejected Shakespeare's ending; Gotter and Benda's singspiel rendition (1776) ended happily; and Zingarelli's tragedia per musica (1796) had the title characters sing a final duet in E-flat major, despite the tragic circumstances. Among the available translations, Beethoven acquired Eschenburg's Romeo und Julia (1779 or earlier), but probably not before composing his quartet. However, the appearance in Berlin of A. W. Schlegel's translation of the vault scene coincided with Beethoven's arrival there in May 1796. This masterful poetical translation may have planted the idea realized in the Adagio of op. 18, no. 1. We know (from a letter of 1810) how highly Beethoven regarded Schlegel's translation, Schindler's assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel's ‘Scottish’ Sonata in G Minor (1843)

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Head
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Northern Germany ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Own Name

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘rührend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

Schubert and the Construction of Memory: The String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’)

2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedict Taylor
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Temporal Consciousness ◽  
A Minor

ABSTRACTAs well over a century of reception history attests, qualities of memory, reminiscence and nostalgia seem to constitute some of the most characteristic attributes of Schubert's music. Yet despite the undoubted allure of this subject and its popularity in recent years, the means by which music may suggest the actions of memory and temporal consciousness are often unclear or under-theorized in scholarship. This article examines how such nostalgic subjectivities are constructed in Schubert's music and the language used to describe it. Rather than overturning the now habitual associations between Schubert and memory, the article seeks to question more deeply how they are, and indeed might better be, supported. It looks principally at the String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’), and draws further on such staples of the Schubertian memory discourse as the Quartet in G, D.887, and the Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960.

scholarly journals Elliott Carter's Analysis of his Piano Sonata (1945-46)

2021 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Ira Braus
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Sonata Form ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Sonata Theory ◽  
External Evidence

In 1948, Elliott Carter penned an analysis of his Piano Sonata for Edgard Varèse.  His analysis of the first movement, in particular, makes one ask why Carter did not subsume its recurrent two-tempo structure under “first group” of its sonata form.  Given Carter’s sophistication,  was he experiencing a moment of music historical “agnosia,” since two-tempo expositions inform  familiar Beethoven  works such as  Piano Sonata, op.31, no.2 and String Quartet in Bb, op.130. This paper explores Carter’s “agnosia” by way of internal and external evidence. Internally, it revisits the thematic chart he attached to the 1948 analysis and goes on to posit the idea that the work’s quintal neo-tonality so saturates its thematic network themes as to distort the composer’s analysis of the form, historical precedents irrespective.  Externally, the paper  compares three works by Beethoven to Carter’s Sonata as regards its two-tempo structure, using concepts borrowed from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (1999).  Finally, the author revisits  writings of Carter and his circle that may explain why his analysis downplayed historical precedents to the Piano Sonata.

Kant, Aesthetic Judgement, and Beethoven

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-65
Author(s):  
John Hare
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Slow Movement ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Better Than

This chapter explores Kant’s conception of the relation of the beautiful and the sublime to freedom and to moral theology. It then turns to Beethoven’s conception of the sublime, and illustrates this by an analysis of the slow movement of his early piano sonata Op. 2, No. 2, and an analysis of the first movement of the Eroica. The thesis of the chapter is that a Kantian ‘optimistic’ account of the sublime fits these pieces better than some other accounts of the sublime that the chapter describes, namely ‘the uncanny sublime’, ‘the authoritarian sublime’ and ‘the solipsistic sublime’. The chapter ends with a brief remark about the relation between Kantian freedom and the Christian faith.

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