Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her ...exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.
The number of surviving medieval secular poems attributed to named female authors is small, some of the best known being those of the trobairitz the female troubadours of southern France. However, ...there is a large body of poetry that constructs a particular textual femininity through the use of the female voice. Some of these poems are by men and a few by women (including the trobairitz); many are anonymous, and often the gender of the poet is unresolvable. A "woman's song" in this sense can be defined as a female-voice poem on the subject of love, typically characterized by simple language, sexual candor, and apparent artlessness.
The chapters inMedieval Woman's Songbring together scholars in a range of disciplines to examine how both men and women contributed to this art form. Without eschewing consideration of authorship, the collection deliberately overturns the long-standing scholarly practice of treating as separate and distinct entities female-voice lyrics composed by men and those composed by women. What is at stake here is less the voice of women themselves than its cultural and generic construction.
The Conductus repertory is the body of monophonic and polyphonic non-liturgical Latin song that dominated European culture from the middle of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. ...In this book, Mark Everist demonstrates how the poetry and music interact, explores how musical structures are created, and discusses the geographical and temporal reach of the genre, including its significance for performance today. The volume studies what medieval society thought of the Conductus, its function in medieval society - whether paraliturgical or in other contexts - and how it fitted into patristic and secular Latin cultures. The Conductus emerges as a genre of great poetic and musical sophistication that brought the skills of poets and musicians into alignment. This book provides an all-encompassing view of an important but unexplored repertory of medieval music, engaging with both poetry and music even-handedly to present new and up-to-date perspectives on the genre.
European history has rarely met changes as rapid, dense and radical as those that have taken place in the regions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire over the past hundred years. This cultural area ...has experienced political conflicts, the setting and dissolution of borders, and the construction of similarities, differences, and ever-new identities.Being tied to text, vocal music genres reflect such changes especially strongly. Operas and operettas, oratorios and cantatas, choir music, folksongs, and pop and rock hits have all helped to establish identities in many ways, connecting people on national, ethnical, local or social levels.The contributions to this volume represent the proceedings of the Annual Congress of the Austrian Society for Musicology (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft - ÖGMw) in 2014. They open multiple perspectives on the identity-relevant implications of every kind of vocal music from the last days of the Habsburg Empire to the present day. As such, the book places the extensively discussed concept of Nationalism in music in the wider context of identity building.
Devotion to St Anne, the apocryphal mother of the Virgin Mary, reached its height in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Until now, Anne's reception history and political symbolism during ...this period have been primarily discussed through the lens of art history. This is the first study to explore the music that honoured the saint and its connections to some of the most prominent court cultures of western Europe. Michael Alan Anderson examines plainchant and polyphonic music for St Anne, in sources both familiar and previously unstudied, to illuminate not only Anne's wide-ranging intercessional capabilities but also the political force of the music devoted to her. Whether viewed as a fertility aide, wise mother, or dynastic protector, she modelled a number of valuable roles that rulers reflected in the music of their devotional programmes to project their noble lineage and prestige.
Expanding in part on earlier studies of the St. John Passion and the principle of “tonal allegory” in Bach's vocal music as a whole, this book investigates the musico‐theological character of the ...passion and the sequence of cantatas that followed its second performance in 1725. Citing many Lutheran authors from the 16th to the 18th century (with particular reference to August Hermann Francke and Johann Jacob Rambach), it attempts to show how Bach responded to the qualities that theologians have long recognized as characteristic of John, and that are now generally described as “Johannine.” Part One sets forth the research “problems” involved in the revisions to and versions of the passion as well as those surrounding the breaking off of the chorale cantata cycle just before Easter 1725 and the composition of the so‐called “Ziegler” cantatas. In addition it lays the conceptual groundwork for Part Two (a five‐chapter study of the St. John Passion) and Part Three (a study of the Spring 1725 cantatas). The book argues that in this unique series of compositions Bach reveals a thoroughgoing understanding of John's special qualities and devises special means of translating them into music.
