Expressive Intersections in Brahms

Description

How Brahms organized musical elements for expressive purposes

Contributors to this exciting new volume examine the intersection of structure and meaning in Brahms's music, utilizing a wide range of approaches, from the theories of Schenker to the most recent analytical techniques. They combine various viewpoints with the semiotic-based approaches of Robert Hatten, and address many of the most important genres in which Brahms composed. The essays reveal the expressive power of a work through the comparison of specific passages in one piece to similar works and through other artistic realms such as literature and painting. The result of this intertextual re-framing is a new awareness of the meaningfulness of even Brahms's most "absolute" works.

Ackowledgements
Part I
1. "The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound": Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms, Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith
2. The Learned Self: Artifice in Brahms's Late Intermezzi, Steven Rings
Part II
3. "Alte Liebe" and the Birds of Spring: Text, Music, and Image in Max Klinger's Brahms Fantasy, Yonatan Malin
4. Brahms's Maidens in their Cultural Context, Heather Platt
5. Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism: Form as Expression in Brahms's Gesang der Parzen, Margaret Notley
Part III
6. Sequence as Culmination in the Chamber Music of Brahms, Ryan McClelland
7. 'Phantasia Subitanea': Temporal Caprice in Brahms's Op. 116, nos. 1 and 7, Frank Samarotto
8. Monumentality and Formal Processes in the First Movement of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, op. 15, James Hepokoski
9. The Drama of Tonal Pairing in Chamber Music of Schumann and Brahms, Peter H. Smith
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Technique musicale
• Technique musicale
• Techniques musicales
• Individual Composer
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• History of classical music traditions
• Musician
• Theory
• Musicology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 18 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005250
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Expressive Intersections in Brahms
M USICAL M EANING AND I NTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
EDITED BY
HEATHER PLATT
AND
PETER H. SMITH
Expressive Intersections in Brahms
Essays in Analysis and Meaning
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
indiana University Press 601 north morton Street Bloomington, indiana 47404-3797 USA
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2012 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Expressive intersections in Brahms : essays in analysis and meaning / [edited by] Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith.
p. cm. - (musical meaning and interpretation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35705-2 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00525-0
(e-book) 1. Brahms, Johannes, 1833-1897-Criticism and interpretation.
I. Platt, Heather Anne. II. Smith, Peter Howard.
ML410.B8E77 2012
780.92-dc23
2011031951
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
Acknowledgments
PART 1
1. The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound : Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms
Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith
2. The Learned Self: Artifice in Brahms s Late Intermezzi
Steven Rings
PART 2
3. Alte Liebe and the Birds of Spring: Text, Music, and Image in Max Klinger s Brahms Fantasy
Yonatan Malin
4. Brahms s M dchenlieder and Their Cultural Context
Heather Platt
5. Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism: Form as Expression in Brahms s Gesang der Parzen
Margaret Notley
PART 3
6. Sequence as Expressive Culmination in the Chamber Music of Brahms
Ryan McClelland
7. Phantasia subitanea : Temporal Caprice in Brahms s op. 116, nos. 1 and 7
Frank Samarotto
8. Monumentality and Formal Processes in the First Movement of Brahms s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, op. 15
James Hepokoski
9. The drama of tonal Pairing in Chamber music of Schumann and Brahms
Peter H. Smith
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index of Brahms s Compositions
General Index
Acknowledgments
The impetus for a volume of essays exploring intersections of consummate technical craft and profound expressivity in Brahms s music arose from discussions with members of the Board of directors of the american Brahms Society. We are indebted to the society for its encouragement and for its generous subvention to defray expenses associated with the production of this book. The society has supported five other volumes: Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. George S. Bozarth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Brahms Studies 1-3, ed. david Brodbeck (lincoln: University of nebraska Press in affiliation with the american Brahms Society, 1994, 1998, and 2001); and On Brahms and His Circle: Essays and Documentary Studies by Karl Geiringer, ed. George S. Bozarth (Sterling Heights, mich.: Harmonie Park Press in association with the american Brahms Society, 2006). Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning complements and extends these works by bringing together some of the most recent scholarly approaches to the analysis and hermeneutic interpretation of Brahms s compositions.
From the very early stages of the project, robert Hatten, series editor, and Jane Behnken, sponsoring editor, at indiana University Press have demonstrated their unflagging support. We are grateful for their guidance through the various stages of work on this volume and for their assistance in arranging for the illustrations that appear in chapters 3 and 4. robert gave generously of his time, perceptively reading each of the essays as they were completed; all our authors have benefited from his editorial acumen. a number of other scholars also offered advice at the very earliest stages, when the concept of the volume was only beginning to emerge: we are grateful for the counsel of richard Cohn, roe-min Kok, and Joseph n. Straus. We would also like to acknowledge the constructive criticisms of the anonymous scholars who reviewed our initial proposal for the press; in particular, we greatly appreciate l. Poundie Burstein s advice and encouragement.
We were fortunate to have contributors who immediately recognized the merits of the project. They conceived fascinating essays, each of which brings a unique voice to the volume, and they graciously participated in discussions throughout the editorial process. aside from the stimulating ideas offered by the authors, both in their essays and in e-mail exchanges, we greatly appreciated their unfailingly prompt responses to our queries and concerns. in particular, we acknowledge Steven rings, who read and commented on our first chapter, The Wondrous transformation of Thought into Sound : Some Preliminary reflections on musical meaning in Brahms.
Travis Jeffords set the musical examples in chapters 4, 5, 8, and 9. it was a pleasure to work with an engraver with such a superb eye for detail and who quickly attended to even the slightest correction or alteration. The examples in the other chapters were prepared by the respective authors; their ability to adapt their finely tuned design techniques to a uniform style greatly eased the burdens of production of the final volume.
Finally, we are especially indebted to our families: Peter s wife and son, lumi and manny, and Heather s husband, mark Kaplan. They too gave their love, time, and patience to this project in far too many ways to enumerate here.
Part One
1 The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound : Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms
Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith
From where he sat, Clive tried to prevent his attention from being drawn into technical detail. For now, it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound. . . . Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose-to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this nonlanguage whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused.
Ian McEwan, Amsterdam
Although the omniscient narrator of Ian McEwan s novel Amsterdam attributes these thoughts to a fictional late twentieth-century British composer, Clive Linley, contemplating his own composition, Linley s reflections capture something of the universal mystery of music. The dualities the narrator develops between technical detail and wondrous transformation, between thought and sound, between hard work and sensual pleasure also resonate strongly with the unique musical persona of Johannes Brahms, a composer whose works have long been admired for their highly wrought craftsmanship as well as for their expressive immediacy. So, too, do the narrator s words capture something of the challenge faced by the music scholar dedicated to the close study of Brahms s compositions. How does one remain attuned to Brahms s abundant compositional craft-the fruits of the composer s hard labor and a self-conscious emblem of his works individuality-without losing sight of the music s sensual beauty? Moreover, how do we engage a musical language that, while not strictly referential, nevertheless possesses deep meaning?
Despite the acuity of McEwan s narrative voice (not to mention the beauty of his prose), the thoughts this voice attributes to the composer Linley remain somewhat marred by an abundance of potentially false dichotomies. Rather than accept the assumption that emotion and intellect stand at odds in Brahms-that we, like Clive Linley, need to avoid being drawn into technical details in order to appreciate the wondrous transformation of thought into sound, to appreciate musical meaning, in other words-the authors in this volume see these characteristics as inextricably linked. Our view and a premise underlying each essay is not that Brahms s music is meaningful in spite of its organizational intricacy but rather that meaning and technical complexity form an intimate bond. These two conceptions of Brahms s music-as a manifestation of powerful intellect and of passionate expressivity-interact dialectically, with meaning poised, as McEwan/Linley would have it, at the intersection of emotion and reason.
Our volume brings together eight perspectives on how meaning may be interpreted in Brahms s compositions, spanning a variety of genres, including works for solo piano, chamber music, and a concerto movement of symphonic proportions, as well as texted works for either solo voice (lieder) or chorus and orchestra. During his lifetime and even throughout much of the twentieth century, Brahms was viewed as a composer of absolute music, that is, music of an abstract or purely formalist character. 1 In more recent decades, historians have uncovered a wealth of documentation demonstrating that neither he nor the members of his circle heard his compositions in this way. Many theorists nevertheless continue to approach his music with something akin to scientific objectivity, apparently, like Linley, finding themselves unable to avoid being drawn into technical detail. Expressive Intersections in Brahms argues that a more thorough understanding of Brahms s music emerges when issues of meaning are considered in conjunction with tho