The goal of this book is to trace the process by which purely instrumental music - music without a text and without any suggestion of an external program - came to be perceived as a vehicle of ideas in the decades around 1800, of just how and why the act of listening came to be …
Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely…
It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase "dead time" to describe the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the root of the problem furthe…
It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase "dead time" to describe the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the root of the problem furthe…
Haydn never discussed his ideas about composition in much detail, either in the interviews he gave to an early biographer or in his surviving correspondence. Moreover, relatively few sketches of his compositions have been preserved. Attempts to reconstruct Haydn's compositional …
"In this first full-length study of the symphony in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Andrew Deruchie provides extended critical discussion of seven of the most influential and frequently performed works of the era, by Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Édouar…
In this first full-length study of the symphony in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, Andrew Deruchie provides extended critical discussion of seven of the most influential and frequently performed works of the era, by Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck, Édouard…
