Kupka's Piano, Giants Behind Us: German Music and its Discontents (original) (raw)

Resisting Schoenberg? The piano concerto in performance

The notion of 'resistibility', whereby a work is performed unsympathetically by those who are not in accord with its overall aesthetic, was propounded by Taruskin as a critique of certain performances of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9. In this dissertation it is examined in relation to Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, Op. 42, which is shown to share several features, including an evocation of the sublime, a requirement for hermeneutic interpretation and liminality, which Taruskin suggests cause Beethoven's work to be resisted. To examine whether Schoenberg's work is resisted in a similar way, the dissertation examines ten recordings of the work, using Hulme's distinction between the vitalist and geometrical as an overarching taxonomic background. Employing a series of empirical techniques including tempo graphs and correlation plots, the performances are assessed for their stylistic approaches against a number of signifiers of vitalist or geometrical stances, including tempo variations within and between sections, the use of tempo to mark structural divisions, and the pianists' use of tempo and dynamic to shape phrases: separate chapters discuss the conductors' and soloists' contributions respectively. The conclusion highlights any broad trends found and reaches a conclusion on whether Schoenberg's work is resisted.

"Clearing the Bench: Absolute Music and The Player Piano" [MTSE 2018]

The player piano reneges on one of the basic promises of musical performance: the fallible performer. As such, it represents one particularly vexing step on music's path from an exclusively human and a-mechanical endeavor, to a mechanically recorded, stored, and mediated experience. The player piano promises a new kind of absolute music to its listener, free from a performer's personal, affective influence or error, but the achievement of absolute music remains elusive even in its mechanical execution. In 1854 Eduard Hanslick discusses absolute music as music that speaks only through sound; the performer " coaxes the electric spark out of its obscure secret place and flashes it across to the listener " to animate the work (1986, 49). But the absolute offered by mechanical music — a performance unfettered by the live performer — uncovers a new and previously unimagined aesthetic space, a space free of physical and expressive human limitations. Mechanical music reshapes the definition of absolute music by allowing composers to explore music without the pianist-as-mediator influencing the musical product. In this paper I will show how the player piano revises standard definitions of absolute music — music about music, defined by Ashby (2010), Bonds (2014), Dahlhaus (1995), Goehr (1992), and others — by suggesting a performance without the present, laboring body and fallible emotive interpretation of a human pianist. Rather than seeking clarity, the proposed paper sheds light on one problem within the discourse on absolute music: its shifting status after the advent of mechanical reproduction. I support my discussion with brief analyses of original works for player piano, each representing a different stage of the player piano's rise, peak, and fall: 1) Igor Stravinsky's Étude pour Pianola (1917), 2) Alfredo Casella's Trois Pièces pour Pianola (1921) and Paul

Touch Divided: artistic research in duo piano performance

This thesis is situated within the paradigm of artistic research. It is a project in which the practice, processes and products of two-piano and piano duet performance constitute the research context, method and outcomes. The research was conducted through the activity of the Viney-Grinberg Piano Duo, of which the author is a member. The thesis is comprised of a folio of three artistic outputs in the form of recordings of musical performances, which are contextualised in a critical commentary.

Negotiating borrowing, genre and mediation in the piano music of Finnissy

Critical Perspectives on Michael Finnissy, 2019

A very large amount of the piano music of Michael Finnissy draws extensively upon existing music, of a highly diverse variety, from Dunstable motets, through various highly contrapuntal works of Bach, Beethoven Symphonies, Berlioz's orchestral and choral works, the operas of Verdi, through to piano and orchestral works of Busoni, the dodecaphonic compositions of the Second Viennese School and later examples of musical modernism, not to mention folk musics from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and Australia, hymn tunes, music hall songs, ragtime, and other popular genres. However, invariably this source material is radically transformed using a huge variety of different techniques which nonetheless generally preserve a few key stylistic or other attributes. This process has been demonstrated and its compositional meanings considered in a certain amount of existing literature, but there has been to date very little critical engagement with the implications of this for performance. In this article, I begin by giving an overview of scholarly models for musical borrowing, then setting out a new taxonomy of Finnissy's borrowings, extending and modifying especially the model developed by J. Peter Burkholder for the music of Charles Ives, as well as drawing upon the work of Gérard Genette on intertextuality. Then I explore in detail the implications of these in terms of interpretive practice, specifically focusing upon the extent to which one looks to situate performing practices in terms of genres associated with performance of the original sources (and in some cases, their later performance history), or in distinction through emphasis upon Finnissy's individual mediation of these sources. Through a variety of approaches to voicing, tempo, tempo flexibility, phrasing, articulation, execution of continuity or discontinuity, as well as strategies for 'distancing' or objectifying musical materials, I will show how a pianist's conclusions and concomitant strategies in these respects can affect perceptions of individual works in terms of their relationship to modernist, neo-romantic and other aesthetic ideologies. Works under consideration are those which combine simultaneously highly disjunct sources, in particular in The History of Photography in Sound. Otherwise, I consider pieces or sections of pieces from the

The orchestra had its own story! Music, images, and movement in Tchaikovsky’s ballets!

Book of Abstract, 2023

Music and literature, the sister arts, emerged as a discrete area of research in the eighteenth century. Brown (1970) explored their relationship as a field of study and concluded that the two arts can be combined in their various genres. Calogero (2002) also claims that integrating music with children’s books enhances the ideas and themes implicit in both while improving basic understandings of language and story. In addition, music, as an integral part of children’s lives, has a unique and powerful ability to affect how children listeners react to a story and provide a subtext and omniscient commentary to the visual narrative (Schaefer, 1998). Therefore, blending music with literature can create a pleasing effect for the young reader/listener, and exploring the world of music through non-fiction picture books helps the children revisit even classical music works. Considering the above theoretical framework, this paper addresses the relationship of music, text, and image to engage young readers with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s famous ballets Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty. The main questions addressed are: How does the music enable the reader to understand the actions, 113 gkarantona@uth.gr; tsilimeni@uth.gr; chrischarakop@uth.gr 267 thoughts, and feelings without reading the text or seeing the visual representations, and in what way-if and- the visualization of the music imitate the rhythm, tempo, and dynamic of the classical music? Focusing on Steven Paul Scher’s typology “music in literature”-music as a theme in literary works, we will examine his statement that music and literature “are viewed as closely akin because they both are auditory, temporal, and dynamic art forms” (Scher, 2004). These classical works of art, adapted by Katy Flint and illustrated by Jessica Courtney-Tickley, might assist us in decoding the music-literary exchange.

Whose Gestures? Chamber Music and the Construction of Permanent Agents

The string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their nineteenth century successors possess an unusually rich and varied gestural vocabulary, and this very richness raises a question addressed in this essay. I begin by proposing (following Maus 1988) that we view a gesture as an intentional action by an imaginary agent who is motivated by some belief, desire, or attitude. According to Maus, musical agency is indeterminate in principle; a triad played by three strings can be imagined as the action of a single agent, or as coordinated actions by three different agents. However, my talk will consider one possible scenario that Maus does not directly address: Can we interpret each instrumental line as a series of actions by a ‘permanent agent’ – that is, as a coherent character/agent that retains its identify throughout an entire movement (Cone 1974)?