The National-Universal Interferences in Romanian Piano Sonatas The pioneers of the Romanian classical music school of composition have their origins in the 19th Century. The folklore was the primary ...source for their musical themes, which will converge with the Western techniques and musical language. The first Romanian piano sonata dates from this period, but the following works will increase year by year. Thus, in the 20th Century, the composers paid more at-tention to innovating methods and modern details. The most essential Romanian composer of the genre is George Enescu. Due to him, to his contemporaries and the next generations (from the second half of the 20th Century), the Romanian piano sonatas are aligned in the European and universal music tendencies.
The sonata is the most enduring and popular genre of instrumental music. This introductory survey presents an overview across the centuries, using analyses of selected works and illustrative music ...examples to provide students, teachers and performers with an accessible yet thorough tool to understand this important repertoire.
In 1921, insurance executive Charles Ives sent out copies of a piano sonata to two hundred strangers. Laden with dissonant chords, complex rhythm, and a seemingly chaotic structure, the so-called ...Concord Sonata confounded the recipients, as did the accompanying book, Essays before a Sonata . Kyle Gann merges exhaustive research with his own experience as a composer to reveal the Concord Sonata and the essays in full. Diffracting the twinned works into their essential aspects, Gann lays out the historical context that produced Ives's masterpiece and illuminates the arguments Ives himself explored in the Essays . Gann also provides a movement-by-movement analysis of the work's harmonic structure and compositional technique; connects the sonata to Ives works that share parts of its material; and compares the 1921 version of the Concord with its 1947 revision to reveal important aspects of Ives's creative process. A tour de force of critical, theoretical, and historical thought, Charles Ives's Concord provides nothing less than the first comprehensive consideration of a work at the heart of twentieth century American music.
Cornel Ţăranu is one of the most appreciated personalities of the Romanian musical life, his creation reaching beyond European borders, all the way to American continents. “Sonata-Ostinato” is ...composed in 1961, based on the baroque monothematic cembalo sonatas of Carl Ph. Em. Bach. The sonata is structured in five segments, using “series” as the main construction element, “antithesis” as the essence of expressivity and “ostinato” process as rhythmical foundation. The difficulties in performing the sonata are not according to the technical skills, but to the capacity of the piano player to decode and to emphasize every series and its particularities.
The article examines the period of European culture associated with the formation of the Viennese Classical School in Austria. The transition of music from the baroque to the classical style in the ...second half of the 18th century was marked by the work of some composers, whose works received various names of stylistic movements, such as “Storm and Wind”, or names specific to the style of orientation of these movements – gallant, sentimental or mixed. A special place in the constellation of composers from this period belongs to Leopold Kozeluch (1747-1818), Czech by origin, who received a selected education in Prague and Vienna, being a student of F. Dušek and A. Salieri. Later, Leopold Kozeluchva occupied a place of honor in Austrian musical culture. Among the numerous works for harpsichord and other instruments signed by Leopold Kozeluch, the Three Sonatas dedicated to Princess Liechtenstein are of particular interest, due not only to the musical material of the sonatas themselves, which reproduce the solemn theme of J. Brahms’ work, but also, directly, to the person to whom they are dedicated – the Princess of Liechtenstein. The Three Sonatas in three movements can form an integral cycle, determined by the internal logic of the unfolding of the events, but they can also be interpreted separately, undoubtedly representing significant individual artistic values.
Abstract
This article analyzes the Adagio opening movement of Fanny Hensel’s sole string quartet by reading the ways in which it dialogues with several genres: the increasingly independent early ...nineteenth-century slow introduction; the slow first movement; eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sonata form; and the fantasia. I build this generic context by considering the historical development of the slow introduction and drawing attention to such overlapping identities in two cello sonata movements by Ludwig van Beethoven and in Hensel’s Sonata o Fantasia in G minor for Piano and Cello (1829).
The article simulates a lecture given in front of a musically non-literate audience, with the aim of illustrating one possible method for translating music into words. The exercise consists in a ...description of the first movement of the Sonata op. 31 no. 2, "The Tempest", by Ludwig van Beethoven. During an intermittent but complete listening of the initial Largo-Allegro, the various passages are introduced, avoiding technical terms and focusing on a description of the expressive effects obtained by the composer through the sound of the piano, and the melody, rhythm, and syntax of the instrumental discourse. The intention is to arouse the interest of the audience, encourage them to listen attentively and consciously, and show the beauty of Beethoven's movement and its extraordinary originality within the landscape of early 19th-century instrumental music. In this case the translation of music into words involved not only an illustration of the music’s internal dramas - contrasts and variations in rhythm, timbre, melody, dynamics, etc. - but also, exceptionally, narrative images that the Sonata material evokes with particular clarity.
The article analyzes the Sonata-reminiscenza of Nikolai Medtner from the point of view of the types of piano texture used in it. It is about such distinctive qualities of the musical texture of this ...work as graphicity, a combination of homophonic-harmonic and polyphonic structure, the relationship between the position in the form and the type of textural design. Starting from the thesis about the priority of the content of musical thematism, the author concludes that only a close analysis of the compositional and dramatic features of the Sonata-reminiscenza of N. Medtner for the performer can become the key to creating an adequate performing concept of the composition and to comprehending its textural features.
This contribution is a brief commentary on the paper "Hypermetrical Irregularity in Sonata Form: A Corpus Study" by Jonathan De Souza and David Lokan. The original paper explores the hypothesis that ...in a sonata form, the development is more hypermetrically stable than the exposition. The published data support the hypothesis. The commentary suggests other paths for discussion and further tweaks to the study that may better show how data support or contradict De Souza and Lokan's intuitions.
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