C. P. E. Bach’s Keyboard Music and the Question of Idiom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schulenberg
Keyword(s):  
Late Work ◽  
Keyboard Music ◽  
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

The keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, commonly described as being for clavichord or generic “clavier,” reveals great variety of idiom, implying significant changes in players’ technical and interpretive approaches to performance of compositions from across the composer’s sixty-year career. This essay analyzes numerous sonatas, rondos, and fantasias, demonstrating the capabilities of both harpsichord and fortepiano for representing metaphoric speech in instances of instrumental recitative and in compositions that represent dialogues between opposing characters. Only the piano, however, can facilitate romantic effects appropriate to certain pieces through dynamics, legato articulation, and manipulation of dampers. Works that the composer described as “comic” actually juxtapose the serious and the farcical, as in the composer’s famous Empfindungen, a late work realizable only on a dynamic instrument.

Haydn’s sensibility

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Webster
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Keyboard Music ◽  
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Recent interpretations of both Haydn’s personality (as a man) and his musical style (or ‘persona’) have focused on the two opposed categories earnestness and wit . The present essay adds a third category on both sides of the equation: sensibility (German Empfindsamkeit ), and argues that it is equally important. The various meanings of sensibility are laid out and their applicability to Haydn discussed, including his rich and varied relationships with lovers and intimate friends. The problematics of the possible correlations between an artist’s personality and his style are discussed; it is argued that, contrary to recent theories of their separation into different domains, these are in fact closely related. Sensibility was a central aspect of mid- and late 18th-century aesthetics, both in ideas about ideal human behavior, and in prose fiction, opera and drama, etc. — as well as instrumental music (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach). In Haydn’s case, not surprisingly, it has so far been located in genres destined primarily for private use: keyboard music and lieder; this is illustrated by an analysis and interpretation of “Das Leben ist ein Traum” (Hob. XXVIa:21; published 1784). In such works we may imagine Haydn as ‘speaking to’ the dedicatee of the work, as well as the sympathetic listener. However, sensibility is also an important aspect of style in the string quartet and symphony, where it has almost never been considered relevant. Examples are discussed in the slow movements from the quartet op. 76 no. 5 and the symphonies nos. 75, 88, 92, 98, 99, and 102. It is argued that the old notion of ‘Classical style’ (fortunately now on the decline), with its rigid demarcation of ‘high’ instrumental genres from both vocal music (Haydn’s operas) and earlier instrumental Empfindsamkeit (Emanuel Bach), was the primary reason that scholars and listeners have until now remained unmoved by Haydn’s sensibility.

Tympan Alley: Posthumanist Performatives in Dancer in the Dark

Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-239
Author(s):  
Lynn Turner
Keyword(s):  
General Condition ◽  
Death Sentence ◽  
Late Work ◽  
The Law ◽  
Animal Question

While it is Derrida's late work on the ‘animal question’ that brought his insistence on limitrophy between species to wider attention, it is also named as the general condition of the limits in the much earlier text, ‘Tympan’. There, in dislocating the tympanum, the margins of philosophy are eaten. Equally, given the rhythmic address of the tympanum, we might say that the margins of philosophy are beaten. This paper considers the persistent play on rhythmic sounds in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark as a ‘tympanising’ or derision of the limits, notably of the limits of the law in both juridical and symbolic senses, as they also work the edges of the film's two styles (broadly, realism and musical). In a provocative analysis of this film, Cary Wolfe suggests that we might understand Selma's vocal style (given singular expression by Bjork) as a refusal of the phallic imposition of language, and that her virtually suicidal submission to the death sentence allows for a notion of a ‘posthuman feminine’. ‘Tympan Alley’ redirects this tantalising term ‘posthuman feminine’ through a more consistently Derridean line of thought to sound out the implications of b/eating the limits through Selma's oblique ear.

Cloud, Precinct of the Theological-Historical

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Copjec
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
Switch Point ◽  
Late Work ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Imaginal World ◽  
Unity Of God

Regarded by many as the pre-eminent Islamicist of the twentieth century, Henry Corbin is also the subject of much criticism, aimed primarily at his supposed overemphasis on the mythological aspects of Islamic philosophy and his idiosyncratic privileging of the concept of the imaginal world. Taking seriously an unusual claim made by Steven Wasserstrom in Religion after Religion that the redeployment of Schelling's concept of tautegory by Corbin reveals all that is wrong with his work, this essay seeks to defend both the concept and Corbin's use of it. Developed by Schelling in his late work on mythology, the concept of tautegory turns out to be, for historical and theoretical reasons, a revelatory switch point. Not only does it make clear why the imaginal ‘locus’ is key to understanding the unity of God – the oneness of his apophatic and revealed dimensions – it also gives us profound insights into the links connecting Islamic philosophy, German Idealism, and psychoanalysis, which all take their bearings from the esoteric or mystical idea of an unconscious abyss.

Notes on Loving a Mourner (with Roland Barthes and Others)

Paragraph ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Matt Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ethics Of Care ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Melanie Klein ◽  
Personal Observation ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Point Of Departure

This essay examines the place of love in grief, staging a relation between a mourner and her lover. Taking as its point of departure Freud's observation that mourning leads to a ‘loss of the capacity to love’, it considers the effects bereavement might have on the bereaved's relations with those that love them, and the possibilities, pitfalls and ethics of care in such a context. This is explored largely through a reading of Roland Barthes's late work (both as a writer of grief and a theorist of love), as well as ideas drawn from Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Sara Ahmed, Hamlet and personal observation. Love and care are thought through alongside notions of ‘tact’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘parrying against reduction’ in late Barthes.

Music of Tragedy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi A. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Dramatic Action ◽  
Instrumental Accompaniment ◽  
And Performance

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Drawing on the ancient conception of mousikē, in which words, song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment were closely linked, Naomi Weiss emphasizes the interplay of performance and imagination—the connection between the chorus’s own live singing and dancing in the theater and the images of music-making that frequently appear in their songs. Through detailed readings of four plays, she argues that the mousikē referred to and imagined in these plays is central to the progression of the dramatic action and to ancient audiences’ experiences of tragedy itself. She situates Euripides’s experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousikē within a broader cultural context, and in doing so, she shows how he both continues the practices of his tragic predecessors and also departs from them, reinventing traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage.

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