Emergent Modality Terrigno, Loretta
Music theory online,
09/2021, Letnik:
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Journal Article
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Among Brahms’s solo Lieder that depict a piece-spanning shift between parallel minor and major tonics, “Todessehnen” (op. 86, no. 6), “Schwermut” (op. 58, no. 5), and “Dämmrung senkte sich von oben” ...(op. 59, no. 1) stand out for setting poetry that portrays a duality between burdensome life and transcendent death, or darkness versus light. This article explores how Brahms’s paradoxical treatment of the life-versus-death theme (associating death with an escape from suffering and the major mode, as noted in related analyses by ".fn_cite($platt_1992)." and ".fn_cite($suurpaa_2003).") correlates with a “tragic-to-transcendent” expressive genre (".fn_cite($hatten_1994).", 69) and enacts a series of poetic “turning points” (".fn_cite($huhn_2005).") that reflect the protagonist’s changing perception of temporality. I argue that the major mode emerges gradually in each song, first as an “implicit” (or “nascent”) tonic, then as a cadentially confirmed (or “realized”) key at the structural cadence. Close Schenkerian analyses of all songs show that their minor-to-major progressions are neither immediate nor direct. Rather, the songs share four tonal features that facilitate the modal change, enact a shift from “tragic” to “transcendent” expression, and actualize “poetic turning points:” 1) the parallel major emerges as a cadentially unconfirmed, nascent tonic; 2) prolongations of ".fn_flat('')."VI or IV delay a cadence in the parallel major key and convey the speaker’s entrance into new temporalities and perceptions; 3) the structural cadence confirms the major key and lays the modal conflict to rest; and 4) the postlude echoes the minor form of ".fn_scaledegree("6").", as if recalling the protagonist’s earlier struggles. The elevated expression of cadential ".fn_figbass("",64)." chords near the structural cadence—treated in the manner of “arrival six-four” chords (".fn_cite($hatten_1994).", 15)—suggests the actualization of a “transcendent” expression and either a future or intensified present temporality that the poem implies but does not realize.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Caring for the carers Godlee, Fiona
BMJ,
09/2011, Letnik:
343, Številka:
sep21 2
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More and more family members are facing this challenge as our populations age, and their emotional and physical health are key to keeping the show on the road. "Placebo effect by proxy" occurs where ...family members (and clinicians) believe a treatment will work and transmit this feeling to the patient. First published in 1957, Letters from a Musical Friendship charts 29 years of what Michael Kelly calls "a symbiotic and brotherly relationship" through conversations about music, art, life, and death (doi: 10.1136/bmj.d5903 ).
Abstract
This article provides a critical account of Brahms’s early collection of quotations, aphorisms and poems commonly known as
Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein
in the context of the ...composer’s youthful engagement with German literature. Drawing on archival materials housed in Vienna, it evaluates the 1909 publication of the
Schatzkästlein
by the Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft and traces Brahms’s path in assembling his quotations to reveal borrowings from sources he encountered in the Schumann house in Düsseldorf in 1854. The second section of the article considers the different modes of reading implied by Brahms’s collection, while the third reflects on the artistic worldview articulated by the assembled entries. While scholars have viewed the
Schatzkästlein
largely as evidence of Brahms’s adolescent infatuation with the writings of the German Romantics, this investigation emphasizes the competing conceptions of artistry present in these fascinatingly messy notebooks and argues that this youthful collection points to the important role played by literature in the development of Brahms’s distinctive musical sensibility.
This report describes the open-source Recorded Brahms Corpus (RBC) dataset, as well as the methods employed to extract and process the data. The dataset contains (micro)timing and dynamic data from ...21 recordings of Brahms's Cello Sonatas, Opp. 38 and 99, focusing on note and beat onsets and duration, tempo fluctuations, and dynamic variations. Consistent manual annotation of the corpus in Sonic Visualiser was necessary prior to automatic extraction. Data for each recording and measurement unit are given as TXT files. Scores in various digital formats, the original SV files and diamond-shaped scape plots visualizations of the data are offered too. Expansion of the corpus with further movements of the sonatas, further recordings thereof and other compositions by Brahms is planned. The study of the data may contribute to performance studies and music theory alike.
The music of Johannes Brahms is deeply colored, Daniel Beller-McKenna shows, by nineteenth-century German nationalism and by Lutheran religion. Focusing on the composer's choral works, the author ...offers new insight on the cultural grounding for Brahms's music.Music historians have been reluctant to address Brahms's Germanness, wary perhaps of fascist implications. Beller-McKenna counters this tendency; by giving an account of the intertwining of nationalism, politics, and religion that underlies major works, he restores Brahms to his place in nineteenth-century German culture. The author explores Brahms's interest in the folk element in old church music; the intense national pride expressed in works such as the Triumphlied; the ways Luther's Bible and Lutheranism are reflected in Brahms's music; and the composer's ideas about nation building. The final chapter looks at Brahms's nationalistic image as employed by the National Socialists, 1933-1945, and as witnessed earlier in the century (including the complication of rumors that Brahms was Jewish).In comparison to the overtly nationalist element in Wagner's music, the German elements in Brahms's style have been easy to overlook. This nuanced study uncovers those nationalistic elements, enriching our understanding both of Brahms's art and of German culture.
The Second Cello Sonata, Op. 99, was the third multi-movement composition that Brahms produced in F major during the mid-1880s, when he turned to F major in that capacity for the first time. One of ...the works of summer 1886 that elevated Brahms’s opus numbers to three digits and occasioned Simrock’s first
Thematisches Verzeichniss, the Sonata was written just as followers of his music were becoming equipped to chart connections between thematic incipits and as he became more attuned to presenting an oeuvre. It richly rewards an intertextual reading of its musical fabric, especially relative to the First String Quintet and the Third Symphony.
This essay explores Op. 99’s debt to its older F major kin – which previous scholarship has grasped incompletely – and argues that Brahms’s ‘late turn’ to F major offers the most compelling illustration, in his music, of a key as a kind of resource. Three main observations about Op. 99 are developed here: (1) its first movement is modelled on the Quintet and Symphony as a repeat of their tonal structure but a reversal of their approach to the second group; (2) its last movement inflects major-mode tonality with an emphasis on the diatonic mediant that is a salient characteristic of several of Brahms’s F major compositions; and (3) it has musical ideas in common with various F-centred pieces or passages before and after the multi-movement works of the mid-1880s, including the middle section of the third movement of the String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1 and the final chorus of Rinaldo.
This essay explores the interplay between states of syntactic completion and incompletion in the text and music of Brahms's O kühler Wald and how the composer thereby conveys an interpretation of the ...poetic text to create an experience for the listener that bears a striking resemblance to the experience of the poem's lovelorn persona.
Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most ...celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays by leading experts are retained and revised, and supplemented by contributions from a new generation of Brahms scholars. Together, they consider such topics as Brahms's relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, his musical interactions with the "New German School" of Wagner and Liszt, his influence upon Arnold Schoenberg and other young composers, his approach to performing his own music, and his productive interactions with visual artists.
Unlike Wagner, Mahler, or Schoenberg, Johannes Brahms is often absent from discussions of Viennese fin-de-siècle psychological theories and their intersections with musical culture. The privileged ...context depicting an aging Brahms resistant to new trends in politics and the arts discourages the notion that he would have known and been influenced by any such developments in the developing field of psychology or psychological arts. As a case study exploring Brahms's potential engagement in these areas, this article reexamines the contested "legend" of Brahms playing piano in dive bars as an adolescent, not to determine its veracity, but in part to reveal how this motif functions in two different narrative models of Brahms biographies to about 1933. In the first model, the composer emerges spotless from the trials of a low-income childhood; in the second, however, he remains scarred by the unhealthy sexual climate of the bars. I argue that cultural-intellectual contexts in fin-de-siècle Vienna influenced Brahms's attempts to shape his biographical narratives and that both models could have originated with Brahms himself. From Paolo Mantegazza's sexology treatises to Hermann Bahr's scandalous plays, the Viennese reading public was confronted with both scientific and literary material that conflated psychology, sexuality, and personal identity, while other artists such as Max Klinger sought to explore the unconscious motivations behind behaviors. In this context, we may reevaluate anecdotal evidence in which Brahms accords his adult problems to a traumatic childhood experience of playing piano in dangerous establishments: it suggests that Brahms could have taken part in fin-de-siècle trends of self-analysis and psychologized autobiography.
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