From exploration paths to mass excursions – variations on a theme of Ray and Knight

2011 ◽  
pp. 87-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Etienne Pardoux ◽  
Anton Wakolbinger
Keyword(s):  
Variations On A Theme

Clara Schumann's Interiorities and the Cutting Edge of Popular Pianism

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 697-765
Author(s):  
Alexander Stefaniak
Keyword(s):  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Variation Sets ◽  
Music Market ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Variations On A Theme

In her contemporaries’ imaginations Clara Schumann transcended aesthetic pitfalls endemic to virtuosity. Scholars have stressed her performance of canonic repertory as a practice through which she established this image. In this study I argue that her concerts of the 1830s and 1840s also staged an elevated form of virtuosity through showpieces that inhabited the flagship genres of popular pianism and that, for contemporary critics, possessed qualities of interiority that allowed them to transcend merely physical or “mechanical” engagement with virtuosity. They include Henselt's études and variation sets, Chopin's “Là ci darem” Variations, op. 2, and Clara's own Romance variée, op. 3, Piano Concerto, op. 7, and Pirate Variations, op. 8. Her 1830s and early 1840s programming offers a window onto a rich intertwining of critical discourse, her own and her peers’ compositions, and her strategies as a pianist-composer. This context reveals that aspirations about elevating virtuosity shaped a broader, more varied field of repertory, compositional strategies, and critical responses than we have recognized. It was a capacious, flexible ideology and category whose discourses pervaded the sheet music market, the stage, and the drawing room and embraced not only a venerated, canonic tradition but also the latest popularly styled virtuosic vehicles. In the final stages of the article I propose that Clara Schumann's 1853 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20, alludes to her work of the 1830s and 1840s, evoking the range of guises this pianist-composer gave to her virtuosity in what was already a wide-ranging career.

Brahms, Rhythm, and the Renaissance

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Heisey
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
Piano Quartet ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Variations On A Theme

Johannes Brahms’s deep engagement with the past contributed to his compositional style in many ways. This article considers Brahms techniques that look back to and expand on those of Renaissance composers, in particular metric conflict and cadences, voice displacement, changes in proportion, rhythmic augmentation and diminution, and the hocket. Examples are taken from Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, Variations On A Theme By Haydn, Piano Quartet in A Major, and Symphony No. 3 in F Major.

Variations on a Theme by a Rogue A.I.: Music, Gameplay, and Storytelling in Portal 2 (Part 1 of 2)

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Reale
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Theme And Variations ◽  
Scientific Experimentation ◽  
Game Developers ◽  
Variations On A Theme

This two-video series explores how the scoring to the video game Portal 2, published by Valve Corporation, not only helps tell the game’s story, but also comments on the game developers’ philosophy of puzzle design. The first video explores how the game’s title theme 9999999, including its texture, voice leadings, and chord qualities, musically enacts dual aspects of the character of the game’s central antagonist GlaDOS: once human, her personality was uploaded into a computer mainframe where she has become a sociopathic, homicidal artificial intelligence who takes delight in subjecting humans to hazardous scientific experimentation. The second video demonstrates that 9999999 serves as the theme for a set of double variations in the game’s middle act. Since Valve’s philosophy of player training centers on iterative puzzle-design that systematically increase in complexity, and the musical accompaniments for these puzzles feature coordinated developments in musical complexity, the scoring here lets us parse the puzzle design into a kind of set of gameplay theme-and-variations.

Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme

Modern Drama ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-382
Author(s):  
Richard Foulkes
Keyword(s):  
Variations On A Theme

scholarly journals Complete reducibility: variations on a theme of Serre

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maike Gruchot ◽  
Alastair Litterick ◽  
Gerhard Röhrle
Keyword(s):  
Algebraic Group ◽  
Spherical Building ◽  
Reductive Algebraic Group ◽  
Identity Component ◽  
General Properties ◽  
Complete Reducibility ◽  
Special Cases ◽  
Variations On A Theme

AbstractIn this note, we unify and extend various concepts in the area of G-complete reducibility, where G is a reductive algebraic group. By results of Serre and Bate–Martin–Röhrle, the usual notion of G-complete reducibility can be re-framed as a property of an action of a group on the spherical building of the identity component of G. We show that other variations of this notion, such as relative complete reducibility and $$\sigma $$ σ -complete reducibility, can also be viewed as special cases of this building-theoretic definition, and hence a number of results from these areas are special cases of more general properties.

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