Symphonic Style Research Articles

„New classicism” and the music of „new humanity” – Hungarian music historiography and Bence Szabolcsi

Hungarian music historiography traditionally regards the dispute about „new Hungarian music” as a contest between conservative and progressive aesthetic views. However, the artistic problem of the Hungarian intelligentsia in the interwar period were more complex. They had tasks such as synchronizing modernism and nationalism, harmonising 19th century ideals and 20th century compositional ideas and redefining the criteria of the national musical-cultural canon. The musicologist Bence Szabolcsi created an influential theory on peasant music inspired symphonic style already in the 1920s. He supported Kodály in his articles and he had a conscious intention to establish a new school of Hungarian music. As a young man Szabolcsi created a future oriented golden age theory based on his belief that the classical era was the absolute peak of European music. He made a diff erence between artistic creation (as a reflection of divine creation) and consciuos composition, classicism and romanticism, culture and civilization, and he regarded the latter categories as the signs of perilous European decadence from which there is no other choice but a „new classicism”, that is a „new testament”. Young Szabolcsi thought „new Hungarian music” could be the new and only path leading back to God, to culture, to music.

SYMPHONIC DISCOURSE IN THE WORK OF VALERIY ANTONYUK

Relevance of the study of the genesis and peculiarities of the development of Ukrainian symphonic music on the current stage of the national cultural paradigm formin. In the paper devoted to symphonic work of the modern Ukrainian composer Valeriy Antonyuk the basic features of his music style are considerеd. His creative tandem with conductor Victoria Zhadko is representеd. The works by V. Antonyuk that are stage for development of Ukrainian symphonic music are identified and analysеd. The obiective of the article congists is the attempt to analyze V. Antonyuk’s symphonic method in cultural discourse as a phenomenon of the totality of artistic, valued, semantic and communicative components. The task of the study: оn the application of the discourse of orchestral performances by composer V. Antonyuk by the conductor V. Zhadko to trace a process of musical images creation in the framework of culturological paradigm «author – conductor – listener». Methodology of investigation consists in combining of analysis and synthesis of biographic determination descriptive method’s (of the main factor of classical romantic tradition as well as of the culturological phenomenon in the artistic, aesthetic and stylish purposes) with integral musicology analysis of symphony discourse in the creative works by V. Antonyuk. Scientific novelty of work consists in a holistic analysis of V. Antonyuk’s musical works taking into account their place in the sociocultural context of contemporaneity. Conclusions. V. Antonyuk in the framework of modern symphonic thinking, overcome by aspiration to a special expressiveness of musical material – сarries out a constructive renewal of symphonic style achieving outstanding results which is an indisputable stimulus for further study of the work of this contemporary Ukrainian composer.

Beethoven’s Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74 and 95 by Nancy November (review)

EARLY AND LATE ROMANTICS Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74 and 95. By Nancy November. (Music in Context.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xiii, 282 p. ISBN 9781107035454 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9781107496798 (e-book), $76.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, tables, bibliography, index.Nancy November's Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets: Opp. 59, 74, and 95 is the first fulllength study of Beethoven's five middleperiod quartets since Gerald Abraham's 1942 monograph for Oxford's Musical Pilgrim series (Beethoven's Second-Period Quartets [London: Oxford University Press, 1942]). While the 71 years separating these two publications have yielded numerous and diverse studies of Beethoven's quartets- most notably Joseph Kerman's groundbreaking exegesis of the entire cycle (The Beethoven Quartets [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1979])-scholars have tended to conceive of the middle-period quartets as transitional works, works that forecast but do not quite achieve the complexity and expressive depth of the last five quartets (plus the Grosse Fuge ), the beating heart of Beethoven's late period.Until recently, the literature has also had relatively little to say on these quartets' historical and cultural context. In part because of the string quartet's symbolic status as the epitome of abstract, absolute musical expression, the notion that these works ought to be studied in relation to the time and place of their composition long thought to be superfluous. The introductory essays in The Beethoven Quartet Companion, edited by Robert Winter and Robert Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), represented an important first step toward a more holistic approach. Such an approach, however, has been slow to emerge. Angus Watson's survey of the entire chamber music oeuvre (Beethoven's Chamber Music in Context [Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2010]) perhaps comes closest, but as a practical listening guide, it necessarily sacrifices depth for breadth.November's book addresses both of these scholarly lacunae, but it also does more than this. Drawing together reception history, music analysis, social and cultural backgrounds, historiography, performance practice, and sketch studies, it offers sophisticated and original perspectives both on individual quartets and on the five quartets as a group. It also contributes new insights to a growing literature that considers how our understanding of Beethoven's music has been mediated by ideological forces that emerged during his lifetime and have remained intrinsic to musical culture ever since.The book is divided into an introduction and eight chapters. The introduction and first two chapters establish the book's agenda and explore the middle-period quartets in broad outline, focusing on such issues as genre, function, canonicity, historiography, and performance. Each of the next five chapters is devoted to a single quartet. The final chapter weaves together a number of loose strands regarding the quartets' reception and offers some provocative concluding thoughts.November begins by critiquing three core paradigms in Beethoven studies: the division of his career into three style periods, the notion of heroic Beethoven, and the persistent analytical focus on the musical score, as opposed to the music's physicality, visual codes, and social meanings (p. 3). While all three critiques will be familiar to Beethoven scholars, they have particular resonance in the context of these five quartets, works that have often been understood in relation to Beethoven's middle-period symphonic style rather than on their own terms. She seeks to carve out some new aesthetic spaces (p. 2) for these works by considering each quartet alongside the contemporary theories, practices, and ideas that informed its design.In lieu of the traditional tripartite view of Beethoven's career, and crucially for her thesis, November posits a epoch (roughly 1800-1815) during which Beethoven was particularly engaged with, and sought further involvement with, theatrical works and theatrical concepts (p. …

Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music and the Notion of Development

It has long been a truism of music criticism that nineteenth-century Russian symphonic music lacks a true sense of development when compared with a normative German model. This article puts forward an alternative way of approaching Russian instrumental music, from the perspective of a different conception of musical and historical time. By interrogating both musically and culturally this idea of temporality, the article suggests a potential distinction between a specifically Western model of time and historical progress—marked by the qualities of onward teleological process and the capacity for organic development, as celebrated in the archetypal Beethovenian symphonic style—and a static, cyclical, repetitive, even timeless conception that may be seen to apply more aptly to several pieces of the nineteenth-century Russian repertory. Yet this neat binary opposition created between East and West is seen to be overly simplistic for many pieces that fall outside the small group of high-profile nationalist works from the Kuchka. The article ultimately argues for a richer understanding of music’s relation with time within both Russian and Austro-German traditions.

August Halm on Body and Spirit in Music

This article explores and explains August Halm's and Heinrich Schenker's differing opinions of Brahms and Bruckner based on Halm's notions of corporeality and spirituality, body and soul, in music, and on differences in symphonic style between the two composers. Corporeality manifests itself in thematic gestures whose contours trace distinctive shapes in music's imaginary space, resulting in the impression of depth, something metaphorically tangible. When the dynamic course of a passage is clearly manifest in the aural immediacy of its rhythmic and thematic gestures, Halm acknowledges its corporeality (Korperlichkeit). When a work's dynamic course is concealed or musically too subtle to be readily perceived, it exemplifies a different quality, spirituality (Geistigkeit), which resides in between the notes and occurs, so to speak, subterraneously. Schenker's Urlinie was thus for Halm a case of unnecessarily "spiritualizing the spiritual yet again."Halm's advocacy for Bruckner's symphonies as marking the beginning of "a new era and culture" was incomprehensible for Schenker, who conceded to Bruckner only a "very modest power of invention." SchenkerÕs unqualified enthusiasm for Brahms, on the other hand, the "last master of German composition," gave Halm a "painful jolt." For Halm, Bruckner is a "cosmic epicist," for Schenker "too much a foreground composer." Letters between Schenker and Halm as well as other, hitherto unknown archival materials among Halm's estate papers delineate Halm's views in contrast to those of Schenker.

Beethoven's Opus 131 and the Uncanny

A new reading of the finale of Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor, op. 131, taking as point of departure the theme in "doublet" form introduced in mm. 22-29. This theme recalls (or retrieves) the fugue subject of the first movement in peculiar ways, analyzed here in perhaps painstaking detail. Over the course of the movement the peculiarities dissipate; the theme recurs in different forms until, in a beautiful passage near the end, it seems less uncanny than reconciliatory, an authentic return at the end of the quartet to the ethos of the great fugue that began it. Meanwhile as the doublet theme develops and grows more expressive, the finale's "heroic" first theme decays. Yet the finale is the only movement in op. 131 to follow sonata-like procedures, strikingly evocative of the "Burnham canon" of middle-period works. Sonata-form narrative is undercut here by a counter-narrative tracing the transformations of the doublet theme, suggesting an overall cyclic rather than teleological dynamic. For Adorno, critique of the heroic ideal was at the heart of Beethoven's late style. Although Adorno did not think so, critique is more explicit in the finale of op. 131 than in many other late works, it is suggested, and more vivid, because the heroic accents of the symphonic style are evoked so deliberately within the movement itself.

An understanding between Bollywood and Hollywood? The meaning of Hollywood‐style music in Hindi films

The symphonic style of Hollywood film music has become a standard part of the background music, and some of the instrumental sections of songs, in Hindi films since around 1950. Music is used in both songs and backing scores to express aspects of drama and narrative, and Hollywood‐style symphonic music and some of its distinctive techniques have become an important part of that expression. This paper examines some examples of the use of Hollywood‐style music in Hindi films and considers what this phenomenon can tell us about the creation of meaning and affect and the interplay of universal and culture‐specific elements.

Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music

Life and work personal style and the individuality of single works Ingenium and Witz the symphonic style issues in sonata form theme and character the underlying form as idea the new path Fidelio church music and the religion of art subthematicism late works.

BRUCKNER AND BRAHMS QUINTETS IN F

THE string Quintet in F major is usually called Bruckner's only contribution to chamber music. This is historically inaccurate, for the Qjiintet had a modest forerunner in a string Quartet in C minor, which has come to light only quite recently.1 However, the Quintet remains the only mature composition of Bruckner's to challenge Brahms in the domain of his own undisputed supremacy. With the third Symphony (second version, 1877-78) it belongs to the first major works by Bruckner to be published at all and thus to reach a wider public than any of his earlier compositions. The composition of the Quintet was suggested to Bruckner in I878 by Joseph Hellmesberger, sen., then director of the Vienna Conservatory, to which Bruckner had been appointed ten years earlier. Hellmesberger wanted new music for his excellent quartet, which had by that time been in existence for nearly thirty years. Bruckner seems to have been unwilling or unable to write a string quartet, perhaps because he instinctively felt the need for a medium allowing for a more ample polyphony suited to his particular instrumental style. Yet it is a gross exaggeration to call this work, as has so often been done, a symphony in disguise. Much rather is it a genuine attempt on Bruckner's part to adjust his symphonic style to the requirements of this, to him, uncongenial medium. This is borne out by a comparison of its four movements with the types of movement found in his symphonies. The first movement of the Quintet (Gemassigt=Moderato) bears the time-signature of 3-4, a very unusual one for an initial movement in any instrumental work by Bruckner, whose symphonies invariably begin in common time or alla breve. His choice of this unaccustomed metre is a sure indication of a deliberate change in style, and so is the use of fugal technique for the third episode of the finale (cf. Eulenburg miniature score, p. 60, bar 5 ff). The happiest balance, surely, is struck in the serenely beautiful Adagio, one of Bruckner's supreme inspirations.2 Here for once he manages to fuse the seraphic 'It was composed in 1862, most probably while Bruckner was studying composition in general and the handling of sonata form in particular with Otto Kitzler. It received its first (posthumous) performance in 1951 at Hamburg. Since then it has been heard at several Bruckner festivals in Germany, but no score has been issued as yet. 2This is the third movement in the Eulenburg score, but in the autograph it takes second place, and it was made to change places with the scherzo in the course of the revisions to which the Quintet was subjected. Robert Haas (' Anton Bruckner ', Potsdam, 1934, P. 136 ff) shows that the work was repeatedly revised up to 1884 and that the score published that year differs in many instances from the autograph. A revision of this published score, based on a collation with the autograph byJ. von Woess, was issued by Universal Edition in Vienna in 1922 (1927).