Bøker i Music in Context-serien

Simon P. Keefe presents a fresh interpretation of one of western music's most celebrated works. The study focuses on historical and current understandings of Mozart's Requiem in fiction, drama, film, criticism and performance, paying special attention to legends surrounding the work, and re-appraises Mozart's musical contributions and completions of the score.

In The Monstrous New Art Anna Zayaruznaya focuses on a group of late medieval musical compositions that foreground monstrous and hybrid creatures and ideas. The book is generously illustrated with figures and music examples, and will be of interest to scholars of music history and fourteenth-century French literature and culture.

In the first detailed contextual study of Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Nancy November explores reception history, early performance practices and aesthetic contexts. Detailed analyses provide new historical understanding of physical, visual, social, ideological and theatrical aspects of this music, offering a fresh critique of key paradigms in current Beethoven studies.

J. P. E. Harper-Scott's book proposes a new theory of musical modernism, bringing contemporary philosophy into contact with music theory and interpretation. It explores the capacity for music to challenge cultural and political ideas and provides a critique of modern music histories.

Rufus Hallmark sets Schumann's famous song cycle in the context of the challenges and social expectations faced by women in early nineteenth-century Germany. His study offers insights on Schumann's composing materials, reception of the song cycle, other contemporary poems about women, and comparisons with other musical settings of the poems.

This unique publication offers fresh perspectives on key manuscript sources of medieval song. In ten chapters, leading experts each treat a single manuscript in detail, offering new findings, essential summaries of each manuscript's contents and historiography, and detailed, accessible analyses of the songs' music and texts.

Maurice Ravel's operas L'Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L'Enfant et les sortileges (1919-25) are pivotal works in the composer's relatively small A uvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the heart of Ravel's compositional aesthetic. In this comprehensive study, Emily Kilpatrick unites musical, literary, biographical and cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's operas. In documenting the operas' history, setting them within the cultural canvas of their creation and pursuing diverse strands of analytical and thematic exploration, Kilpatrick reveals crucial aspects of the composer's working life: his approach to creative collaboration, his responsiveness to cultural, aesthetic and musical debate, and the centrality of language and literature in his compositional practice. The first study of its kind, this book is an invaluable resource for students, specialists, opera-goers and devotees of French music.

This unique publication offers fresh perspectives on key manuscript sources of medieval song. In ten chapters, leading experts each treat a single manuscript in detail, offering new findings, essential summaries of each manuscript's contents and historiography, and detailed, accessible analyses of the songs' music and texts.

Presents new methodologies to explore medieval processes of musical and poetic creation, from plainchant and vernacular French songs to organa, motets and clausulae. Engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring authorship, originality, practices of quotation and reworking.

This book examines the role of place in Delius' works, challenging existing views on their complex historical and musical contexts. It will appeal to readers familiar with Delius' music, and to those seeking a detailed guide to selected pieces, as well as those new to his work.

Exploring the philosophical dimensions of Brahms's music, this book analyzes his elegiac works and their relationship to German literature. Of interest to musicology, German studies and cultural history scholars, it illuminates how Brahms's music relates to aesthetics and modernity from Hoelderlin, Schiller, and Goethe to the Frankfurt School.

Self-referential music illuminates connections between musicians and reveals similarities between their networks and those of other professionals, especially visual artists. This book will appeal to readers interested in the music and culture of the late medieval and early modern eras - musicians, musicologists, and historians of art and culture.

A significant addition to the scholarship available in English on Victoria and his music, this study encompasses the genesis, style, and impact of the six-voice Requiem. It will be of interest to students and scholars studying the Renaissance and sacred and courtly rituals in the early-modern period more generally, as well as enquiring listeners.

"The symphony has long been entangled with ideas of self and value. Though standard historical accounts suggest that composers' interest in the symphony was almost extinguished in the early 1930s, this book makes plain the genre's continued cultural dominance, and argues that the symphony can illuminate issues around space/geography, race, and postcolonialism in Germany, France, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on a number of symphonies composed or premiered in 1933, this book recreates some of the cultural and political landscapes of an uncertain historical moment-a year when Hitler took power in Germany, and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination asks what North American and European symphonies from the early 1930s can tell us about how people imagined selfhood during a period of international insecurity and political upheaval, of expansionist and colonial fantasies, scientised racism, and emergent fascism. Emily MacGregor is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department, King's College London. She was awarded the 2019 Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association for a distinguished article by a scholar at an early stage of their career, and previously held a Marie Curie Global Fellowship. Dr MacGregor appears regularly on BBC Radio 3"--

Franz Schubert's music has long been celebrated for its lyrical melodies, 'heavenly length' and daring harmonic language. In this new study of Schubert's complete string quartets, Anne Hyland challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. Her exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert's development of a lyrically conceived teleology, bringing musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. Her formal analyses grant special focus to the quartets of 1810-16, isolating the questions they pose for existing music theory and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology thereby opening up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them.

"Combining analyses of modernist concert and stage music by Elisabeth Lutyens with those of her audiovisual scores, and contextualising Lutyens and Edward Clark's biographies within international developments in dodecaphonic music and music-making, this book will speak to a wide audience interested in British and European twentieth-century music"--