Bach Perspectives, Volume 5

Bach Perspectives, Volume 5
Author: Stephen A. Crist
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2002-12-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780252027888

In this work, nine scholars track Johann Sebastian Bach's reputation in America from an artist of relative obscurity to a cultural mainstay whose music has spread to all parts of the population, inspired a wealth of scholarship, captivated listeners, and inspired musicians.

Bach Perspectives, Volume 12

Bach Perspectives, Volume 12
Author: Robin A. Leaver
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252050711

Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang many of the same vernacular hymns. Internal squabbles were rarely missing within Lutheranism, for example Pietists' dislike of concerted church music, especially if it employed specific dance forms. Also investigated here are broader issues such as the close affinity between Bach's cantata libretti and the hymns of Charles Wesley; and Bach's music in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment as shaped by Protestant Rationalism in Berlin. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Joyce L. Irwin, Robin A. Leaver, Mark Noll, Markus Rathey, Derek Stauff, and Janice B. Stockigt.

Bach Perspectives, Volume 14

Bach Perspectives, Volume 14
Author: Paul Corneilson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-11-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252053680

Today, the names Bach and Mozart are mostly associated with Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But this volume of Bach Perspectives offers essays on the lesser-known musical figures who share those illustrious names alongside new research on the legendary composers themselves. Topics include the keyboard transcriptions of J. S. Bach and Johann Gottfried Walther; J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart's freelance work; the sonatas of C. P. E. Bach and Leopold Mozart; the early musical training given J. C. Bach by his father and half-brother; the surprising musical similarities between J. C. Bach and W. A. Mozart; and the latest documentary research on Mozart’s 1789 visit to the Thomasschule in Leipzig. An official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives, Volume 14 draws on a variety of approaches and a broad range of subject matter in presenting a new wave of innovative classical musical scholarship. Contributors: Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Yoel Greenberg, Noelle M. Heber, Michael Maul, Stephen Roe, and David Schulenberg

Bach Perspectives, Volume 8

Bach Perspectives, Volume 8
Author: Daniel R. Melamed
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252090217

As the official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives has pioneered new areas of research in the life, times, and music of Bach since its first appearance in 1995. Volume 8 of Bach Perspectives emphasizes the place of Bach's oratorios in their repertorial context. These essays consider Bach's oratorios from a variety of perspectives: in relation to models, antecedents, and contemporary trends; from the point of view of musical and textual types; and from analytical vantage points including links with instrumental music and theology. Christoph Wolff suggests the possibility that Bach's three festive works for Christmas, Easter, and Ascension Day form a coherent group linked by liturgy, chronology, and genre. Daniel R. Melamed considers the many ways in which Bach's passion music was influenced by the famous poetic passion of Barthold Heinrich Brockes. Markus Rathey examines the construction and role of oratorio movements that combine chorales and poetic texts (chorale tropes). Kerala Snyder shows the connections between Bach's Christmas Oratorio and one of its models, Buxtehude's Abendmusiken spread over many evenings. Laurence Dreyfus argues that Bach thought instrumentally in the composition of his passions at the expense of certain aspects of the text. And Eric Chafe demonstrates the contemporary theological background of Bach's Ascension Oratorio and its musical realization

Bach Perspectives, Volume 6

Bach Perspectives, Volume 6
Author: Gregory Butler
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2007-01-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252030427

As the official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives has pioneered new areas of research in the life, times, and music of Bach since its first appearance in 1995. In a series long known for its major essays by leading Bach scholars and performers, Bach Perspectives, Volume 6 is no exception. This volume opens with Joshua Rifkin's seminal study of the early source history of the B-minor orchestral suite. It not only elaborates on Rifkin's discovery that the work in its present form for solo flute goes back to an earlier version in A minor, ostensibly for solo violin, but also takes this discovery as the point of departure for a wide-ranging discussion of the origins and extent of Bach's output in the area of concerted ensemble music. Jeanne Swack presents an enlightening comparison of Georg Phillip Telemann's and Bach's approach to the French overture as concerted movements in their church cantatas, and Steven Zohn views the B-minor orchestral suite from the standpoint of the "concert en ouverture," responding to Rifkin by suggesting that the early version of the B-minor orchestral suite may also have been scored for flute.

Bach Perspectives, Volume 9

Bach Perspectives, Volume 9
Author: Andrew Talle
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252095391

This provocative addition to the Bach Perspectives series offers a counternarrative to the isolated genius status that J. S. Bach and his music currently enjoy. Contributors contextualize Bach by examining the output, reputation, and compositional practices of his contemporaries in Germany whose work was widely played and enjoyed in his time, including Georg Philipp Telemann, Christoph Graupner, Gottlieb Muffat, and Johann Adolf Scheibe. Essays place Bach and his work in relation to his peers, examining avenues of composition they took while he did not and showing how differing treatments of the same subjects or texts resulted in markedly different compositional results and legacies. By looking closely at how Bach's contemporaries addressed the tasks and challenges of their time, this project provides a more nuanced view of the musical world of Bach's time while revealing in more specific terms than ever how and why Bach's own music remains fresh and compelling. In this volume, Wolfgang Hirschmann proposes an ethnographic approach that contextualizes Bach's works, addressing the aesthetic paths he took as well as those he did not pursue. Steven Zohn's essay considers Telemann's contribution to the orchestral Ouverture genre, observering how Telemann's approach to integrating the national styles of his time was quite different from, but no less rich than, Bach's. Andrew Talle compares settings and strategies of Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust by Bach and Graupner. Alison Dunlop presents valuable primary research on Muffat, the most commonly cited keyboard music composer in Vienna during Bach's lifetime. Finally, Michael Maul sheds new light on the Scheibe-Birnbaum controversy, contextualizing the most famous critique of J. S. Bach's compositional style by discussing the other composers that Scheibe critiqued.

Bach Perspectives, Volume 7

Bach Perspectives, Volume 7
Author: Gregory Butler
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2008
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252031652

Correspondence capturing Dreiser's own take on his long and eventful life In addition to his novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and a flood of journalism, Theodore Dreiser is estimated to have written an astonishing 20,000 letters. A Picture and a Criticism of Life presents a selection from his previously unpublished letters and shows Dreiser in every mood and circumstance, from crisply professional to happily unbuttoned. Meticulously annotated by Donald Pizer, the selections often shed significant new light on the writer's beliefs and activities during the various stages of his long career. A volume in the series The Dreiser Edition, edited by Thomas P. Riggio

John Sullivan Dwight

John Sullivan Dwight
Author: Bill F. Faucett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2023
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0197684181

"John Sullivan Dwight (1813-93) was for much of the nineteenth century America's leading music critic. Born into a musical family and educated at several premiere Boston schools, he fell under the spell of New England Transcendentalism during which time he befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and others of a similarly progressive mindset. Dwight resided at the socialist/utopian community of Brook Farm where he learned the art of journalism and the business of publishing while writing for The Harbinger. He wrote on many topics-Transcendentalism, of course, but especially on music and musical performance. Dwight was a skilled communicator, and he conveyed ideas powerfully, persuasively, and constantly in language that had recently been given verve by German Romanticism and Emersonian Transcendentalism. When Brook Farm collapsed, Dwight's professional prospects ran desperately low. After several years as a journeyman writer, he launched in 1852 his own Dwight's Journal of Music: A Paper of Art and Literature, a newspaper that firmly established him as a serious music critic. The Journal was published regularly until 1881. It was and remains an important periodical. In its own time, it spoke to America's growing appetite for art music; today it is indispensable for research into nineteenth-century American classical music, especially in Boston. This biography follows Dwight's fascinating life as he meets and writes about some of the era's most crucial intellectuals and musicians. His enormous body of essays, reviews, and translations, much of it illuminated here, leads to the conclusion that Dwight the Music Critic and Dwight the Transcendentalist are inseparable"--

Music in German Immigrant Theater

Music in German Immigrant Theater
Author: John Koegel
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2009
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1580462154

A history -- the first ever -- of the abundant traditions of German-American musical theater in New York, and a treasure trove of songs and information.

Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness

Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness
Author: Kelsey Klotz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2023-02-07
Genre: Jazz
ISBN: 0197525075

How can we--jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians--understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America. Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.