The First Movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony and the “Burden” of Romantic Form

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-340
Author(s):  
Eric Hogrefe

AbstractStudies of post-Classical form must inevitably contend with the issue of how eighteenth-century practices retain relevance in later repertory. This article offers a framework for considering musical form and historical distance around the beginning of the twentieth century. Following historian Hayden White, I analyze the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony as an example of formal troping. Mahler’s movement is shown to enact a conflict between metaphor and metonymy in its treatment of Adagio practice and sonata form. In portraying Mahler’s form tropologically, this article emphasizes the role of historical distance within Mahler’s formal imagination.

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65
Author(s):  
Carl Wiens

In William Caplin’s Classical Form (1998), the ending of a sonata-form exposition’s two-part transition and a two-part subordinate theme’s internal cadence share the same harmonic goal: the new key’s dominant. In this article, the author contends that the choice between the two is not as clear-cut as Caplin suggests, arguing that the functional role of these passages should be read within the context of the entire sonata movement, rather than on more localized analytical interpretations of the sonata’s sections taken in isolation. Two works are discussed: the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 2, no. 3, and the first movement of the Piano Sonata op. 10, no. 2.


Author(s):  
Danuta Mirka

The chapter starts with the discussion of the aesthetic category of “humorous music,” which emerged in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and links it to the theory of multiple agency, proposed by Edward Klorman (2016). There follow two case studies of hypermetric manipulations in the first movements of Haydn’s string quartets Op. 50 No. 3 and Op. 64 No. 1. These analyses reveal how such manipulations act in concert with ingenious deployment of musical topics and contrapuntal-harmonic schemata, and how they affect musical form. The chapter closes with remarks about the role of the first violinist in Haydn’s string quartets.


Author(s):  
L. Poundie Burstein

Musical form is often discussed by appealing to metaphors that compare formal sections either to types of containers or to segments of journeys. Although both metaphors are usually combined and used interchangeably by most music analysts, since the nineteenth century container metaphors for form have tended to dominate. This contrasts with what was witnessed during the eighteenth century, where journey metaphors for musical form were more prevalent. The introductory chapter broadly compares container metaphors and journal metaphors for form, especially as they apply to sonata-form expositions in works composed during the Galant era. This chapter also introduces some of the features that tend to distinguish eighteenth-century formal discussions from modern ones, and it concludes with a preview of some of the strategies to be explored in subsequent chapters.


Author(s):  
L. Poundie Burstein

Through much of the eighteenth century, commentators often described musical form in relation to a type of journey leading toward a set of specific tonal/harmonic/melodic/rhythmic goals, punctuated along the path by a standard series of resting points. Partly in reaction to developments witnessed in music composed during the high Classical era onward, since around the nineteenth century descriptions of musical form have tended to combine or even replace these “journey” metaphors with those that rely more heavily on architectonic analogies. When dealing with works composed around the middle of the 1700s, however, there are advantages for viewing musical form as it unfolds, much in the manner described by those who composed, improvised, listened to, and performed at the time. Taking as its focus the part of the movement now known as the exposition, this study analyzes the form of sonata-form works from Galant era by applying concepts and methodologies that stem from the eighteenth century, particularly those proposed by Heinrich Christoph Koch. It argues that analyzing this music through such a vantage point provides a valuable opportunity for understanding its form in a down-to-earth manner that can directly inform practical aspects of listening and performance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dániel Bárth

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of the Christian lower priesthood in local communities in eighteenth–twentieth century Hungary and Transylvania in cultural transmission. The author intends to map out the complex and changing conditions of the social function, everyday life, and mentality of the priests on the bottom rung of the clerical hierarchy. Particular emphasis is placed on the activity of priests active at the focus points of interaction between elite and popular culture who, starting from the second half of the eighteenth century, often reflected both directly and in a written form on the cultural practices of the population of villages and market towns. The theoretical questions and possible approaches are centered around the complex relations of the priest and the community, their harmonious or conflict-ridden co-existence, questions of sacral economy, stereotypes of the “good priest” and the “bad priest” as shaped from above and from below, the subtleties of “priest-keeping”, the intentions related to preserving traditions and creating new customs, and the different temperaments of priests in relation to these issues.


Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.


2019 ◽  
pp. 204-220
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

The Conclusion sets the broader context for the key episodes of innovation driven by projectors that have been the subjects of the preceding chapters. It explores the role of diverse enterprisers in the evolution of schools in Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century and later. These enterprisers included numerous private teachers, who dominated the educational landscape in Russia well into the nineteenth century, and diverse officials who promoted their personal projects from within the emerging educational bureaucracy. Contrary to the pervasive myth that the “state” has always been and still is the only player in education in Russia, similar dynamics, to some extent, are observed also in the twentieth century and today.


Author(s):  
L. Poundie Burstein

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, some music commentators—including Francesco Galeazzi, A. C. F. Kollmann, and Franz Christoph Neubauer—reacted to recent stylistic trends in their discussion of music form. Accordingly, their writings placed greater emphasis on cadences (as opposed to resting points of various types), implied sections, and thematic character as vital elements for understanding musical form, thereby serving as harbingers for later discussions of musical form. Even so, their observations and descriptions of the section that modern terminology labels as the sonata-form exposition—as well as the works they choose as exemplars of the form—suggest a theoretic approach that differs in some telling ways from what is typical in modern accounts of sonata form.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrique Leitão ◽  
Francisco Malta Romeiras

When dealing with the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal and with the building of anti-Jesuitism in the eighteenth century, historians usually focus on their alleged involvement in the attempt to murder king Dom José I and on the complex economical questions related with the foundation of the state trade company in Brazil. However, the Pombaline accusation of obscurantism and scientific illiteracy also played a central role in the history of anti-Jesuitism in Portugal, mainly due to its wide acceptance and longevity. This argument was not only directly relevant for the expulsion of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century but it was also a keystone of the anti-Jesuit propaganda that eventually led to the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Portugal in the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
pp. 67-85
Author(s):  
Michael Hunter

This chapter turns to the rather paradoxical role of the early Royal Society in connection with magic, since as an institution it proved far less supportive of the supernaturalist project of Joseph Glanvill and Robert Boyle than might have been expected. This reveals significant fissures in scientific circles at the time which are often ignored. It was only in the early eighteenth century that the society's avoidance of magic was construed as displaying a systematically sceptical attitude which in practice had never really existed. This formed a part of the process by which the orthodox gradually began to come round to a cautiously sceptical viewpoint. The chapter ends by considering the legacy of their misrepresentation of the society's earlier role down to the twentieth century.


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