Johannes Brahms was a consummate professional musician, a successful pianist, conductor, music director, editor and composer. Yet he also faithfully championed the world of private music-making, ...creating many works and arrangements for enjoyment in the home by amateurs. This collection explores Brahms' public and private musical identities from various angles: the original works he wrote with amateurs in mind; his approach to creating piano arrangements of not only his own, but also other composers' works; his relationships with his arrangers; the deeper symbolism and lasting legacy of private music-making in his day; and a hitherto unpublished memoir which evokes his Viennese social world. Using Brahms as their focus point, the contributors trace the overlapping worlds of public and private music-making in the nineteenth century, discussing the boundaries between the composer's professional identity and his lifelong engagement with amateur music-making.
Brahms's self-identity and public identity as a Liberal are the basis for the two historical perspectives in this book. One reconstructs his place in Vienna. The other draws on criticism conditioned ...by Western Marxism, on ideas developed in response to 19th-century Liberalism. Brahms appears not to have recognized a societal problem of late Liberalism: exaggerated emphasis on the individual. He did, however, recognize a related musical problem delineated by Adorno — individualized themes at the expense of the formal whole — and made it central to his lifework. Commentary on Brahms's chamber music draws on other ideas articulated by Adorno and Lukács such as “second nature”, while discussion of ideology of the symphony applies Habermas's explanation of the “public sphere”, in both instances to move between social and musical problems associated with late Liberalism. Emphasis is placed on Brahms's diverse sources of renewal and on an under-explored facet of his music: his mastery of ways and degrees of establishing a key in this late period of tonality. With Brahms's works and his circumstances as exemplars, an addendum to late-style dialectics is proposed: late works are at once an expression of their time and alienated from the contemporary context. For better and worse, Brahms remained an orthodox Liberal. Thus, despite his allegiance to German nationalism he did not succumb to the tribalism that became critical around 1890.
BRAHMS'S Late Intermezzi Armstrong, Asher
The American music teacher,
06/2022, Letnik:
71, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...the well-known examples of Brahms's embedding of programmatic or textual elements into otherwise absolute pieces were identified in those early lectures as isolated examples: the slow movements of ...the first and third piano sonatas, the "Edward" Ballade, the Op. 9 Schumann Variations and the seemingly lone example from his Op. 117, the famous E-flat lullaby. ...the final Intermezzo in C-sharp minor sees Brahms return to, or perhaps complete, the folk song threnody of the first piece. Oh woe, woe, for love is happy/only once a while, while it is new/Once it becomes old, then it becomes cold/and passes away like morning dew" (Parmer 2020, 376). In terms of performance practice, the bleak grimness of the opening is instantly relat-able to comparable sounds we would associate with folk music of the British Isles (and, by inheritance, Appalachia).
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his ...music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms’s small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim; singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold; composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg; and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms’s allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to plausibly reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents, and to restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.
Without doubt the sound-color of a certain instrument or group of instruments is an essential musical component, yet its realization in compositions is rarely the subject of analytical studies. This ...paper explores Brahms’ treatment of Klangfarbe (sound-color or instrumental timbre) in his string chamber works and argues that it is strongly related to the musical structure and the development of Brahms’s compositional technique over time. In his early sextets, regrouping and repositioning of instrumental parts occurs mostly at structural turning points, causing a regular change of the sound. In contrast, his late quintets are characterized by more fluent, irregular changes of instrumental combinations. On one hand, this is a result of the flexible part-writing realized through sophisticated counterpoint and motivic development. On the other, it may reflect his mature imagination of sound-color cultivated through his musical activities and experience, as such flexible treatment of instrumental timbre supports the structural complexity.
In memoriam Manfred Hermann Schmid (1947–2021), Mozartian extraordinaire The cadenzas to the Piano concerto in D minor, K466 that Clara Schumann published for the Mozart centenary year raise ...intriguing questions about authorship: Upon correcting the proofs, she identified an uncanny overlap with a cadenza by Brahms. Following an ambivalent response from the latter, she went on publishing the work under her name regardless, and even left a note on her papers claiming that Brahms had made use of a cadenza by her. Rather than answering the author attribution either way, the article unpicks the conflicting evidence of the sources in light of the broader contexts within which they are situated. It demonstrates that conventional tools of music philology alone are inadequate for solving this issue (as they had been for Schumann in 1891). Notated sources are but one manifestation of a rich and complex creative process that operate within a multi-sensory, multi-modal and co-creative framework. As such, a close reading of the cadenzas to K466 by Schumann and Brahms interrogate false ontologies of the ‘work concept’ that may have mired our understanding of nineteenth-century music in general.
ABSTRACT
Leading notes possess a powerful drive: once they take hold of the music, their upward resolution is all but certain. In Brahms's works, however, their force tends to dwindle, and many end ...up yielding chromatically downward. Leading notes typically deflate in order from high to low along the sequence of sharps, resulting in a broad process of tonal de‐intensification. Through close voice‐leading analyses of two accompanied part songs (‘Abendlied’, Op. 92 No. 3, and ‘Der Abend’, Op. 64 No. 2) and two piano pieces (the E major Intermezzo, Op. 116 No. 4, and the B minor Capriccio, Op. 76 No. 2), I argue that the decay in leading‐note energy is in part what gives Brahms's music its weary, twilight tone. In so doing, I seek to bridge a gap between our understanding of the voice leading of Brahms's music and one of the prevailing aspects of the composer's reception.
