Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment PDF Download

Author: Johann Georg Sulzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521360358
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Can an abstract theory of Empfindsamkeit aesthetics have any value to a musician wishing to study composition in the classical style? The eighteenth-century German theorist and pedagogue Heinrich Koch showed how this question could be answered with a resounding yes. Starting with the systematic aesthetic theory of the Swiss encyclopedist Johann Sulzer, Koch was creatively able to adapt Sulzer's conservative ideas on ethical mimesis and rhetoric to concrete problems of music analysis and composition. In this collaborative study, Thomas Christensen and Nancy Baker have translated and analysed selected writings of Sulzer and Koch respectively, bringing to life a little-known confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch's appropriation of Sulzer's ideas to the service of music represents an important development in the evolution of Western musical thought.

Author: Matthew Riley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351556908
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
The silent attentiveness expected of concert audiences is one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern Western musical culture. This is the first book to examine the concept of attention in the history of musical thought and its foundations in the writings of German musical commentators of the late eighteenth century. Those critics explained numerous technical features of the music of their time as devices for arousing, sustaining or otherwise influencing the attention of a listener, citing in illustration works by Gluck, C. P. E. Bach, Georg Benda and others. Two types of attention were identified: the uninterrupted experience of a single emotional state conveyed by a piece of music as a whole, and the fleeting sense of 'wonder' or 'astonishment' induced by a local event in a piece. The relative validity of these two modes was a topic of heated debate in the German Enlightenment, encompassing issues of musical communication, compositional integrity and listener competence. Matthew Riley examines the significant writers on the topic (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Rousseau, Meier, Sulzer and Forkel) and provides analytical case studies to illustrate how these perceived modes of attention shaped interpretations of music of the period.

Author: Joshua S. Walden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190653507
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Joshua S. Walden's study of the genre of musical portraiture since 1945 focuses on significant composers of the period, including Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, and György Ligeti. Grounding his exploration in key works, Walden uncovers contemporary understandings of music's capacity to depict identity, and of intersections between music, literature, theater, film, and the visual arts.

Author: Holly Watkins
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659484X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Does it make sense to refer to bird song—a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate—as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest? Redefining music as “the art of possibly animate things,” Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.

Author: W. Dean Sutcliffe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110701381X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
Interprets an eighteenth-century musical repertoire in sociable terms, both technically (specific musical patterns) and affectively (predominant emotional registers of the music).

Author: Christina K. Lindeman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351768069
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Portraits of Anna Amalia, Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach chart a shift in perceptions of her public identity and of the gender dynamics that shaped that identity. This manuscript is more than just a patronage study or a biography; it is concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people around her shaped it, too. This study sheds real light on the power of portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.

Author: Helen M. Greenwald
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0195335538
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 1217

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Book Description
Fifty of the world's most respected scholars cast opera as a fluid entity that continuously reinvents itself in a reflection of its patrons, audience, and creators.

Author: Ferdia J. Stone-Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317092228
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Music and Transcendence explores the ways in which music relates to transcendence by bringing together the disciplines of musicology, philosophy and theology, thereby uncovering congruencies between them that have often been obscured. Music has the capacity to take one outside of oneself and place one in relation to that which is ’other’. This ’other’ can be conceived in an ’absolute’ sense, insofar as music can be thought to place the self in relation to a divine ’other’ beyond the human frame of existence. However, the ’other’ can equally well be conceived in an ’immanent’ (or secular) sense, as music is a human activity that relates to other cultural practices. Music here places the self in relation to other people and to the world more generally, shaping how the world is understood, without any reference to a God or gods. The book examines how music has not only played a significant role in many philosophical and theological accounts of the nature of existence and the self, but also provides a valuable resource for the creation of meaning on a day-to-day basis.

Author: Marion Lars Hendrickson
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820463469
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Theological aesthetics is a rapidly expanding subject in the field of religious humanism that, until now, has not had a participating Lutheran voice. Musica Christi: A Lutheran Aesthetic fills this void by approaching the rich tradition of music and theology in the Lutheran Church through Christology. Furthermore, this study shows Christ's full participation in and by music. Selections from Lutheran works in Danish, German, Latin, Norwegian, and Swedish are offered in English translations for the first time by the author.

Author: J. Kennaway
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137339519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
The relationship between music and the nervous system is now the subject of intense interest for scientists and people in the humanities, but this is by no means a new phenomenon. This volume sets out the history of the relationship between neurology and music, putting the advances of our era into context.