Musical Topics and Musical Performance

Julian Hellaby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032110851
• eBook ISBN: 9781000815351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

The principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by later receivers, albeit in a different context and with a need for historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980) introduced the idea of topics, his relatively simple ideas have been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors. Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of musicology, often embracing semiotics, but its relationship to performance has received less attention. Musical Topics and Musical Performance thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice, and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as well as how performers have responded to such a presence in practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from composers as diverse as Beethoven, Scriabin and Péter Eötvös. Using both scores and recordings, the book presents a variety of original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of distinguished authors, and addresses a neglected area of musicology and musical performance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Musical Examples
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Topics and Music Performance: Some Reflections and Proposal for a Theory
• 2 “Rhetorical” versus “Organicist” Performances: A Pragmatic Approach
• 3 ‘Es brennt mein Eingeweide’: Agitato Settings of Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
• 4 Expanding the Parameters of Historically Informed Performance: Topics in Nineteenth-Century Miniatures for Stringed Instruments
• 5 Piano Schools, Topics and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor
• 6 Narrative Analysis, the Sonata Cycle and Implications for Performance: A Reading of Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp Minor
• 7 ‘Here One Must Conjure While Playing’: Topical Performance in the Piano Works of Scriabin
• 8 The Topic of the Gato in the Early Works of Alberto Ginastera and the Disambiguation of ‘Pequeña danza’
• 9 Topics and Performance in Péter Eötvös’s Violin Concerto Seven (2007)
• 10 Romantic Performance and Gestural Topic
• Index