A survey of the development of romantic music includes analyses of the careers of composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt

Romantic Music: Sound and Syntax is the first study to examine the role played by qualities of sound in shaping Romantic musical form. By demonstrating the crucial interaction of sound and syntax in Romantic music, Leonard G. Ratner demonstrates the effectiveness of a new theoretical approach to musical analysis, incorporating sound as an analytical factor for the first time. The book is divided into 13 chapters. Chapter 1 surveys critical comments dealing with qualities of sound in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 examines the continuity between Classic and Romantic texture and sound. Specific examples drawn from piano, orchestral, and chamber music literature are discussed in chapters 3-5. Chapter 6 explores the uses of harmonic color in the Romantic repertoire. Chapter 7 reviews the tradition of the period form in Western music and its continuity in Romantic music.

A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.

Music theorists have long believed that 19th-century triadic progressions idiomatically extend the diatonic syntax of 18th-century classical tonality, and have accordingly unified the two repertories under a single mode of representation. Post-structuralist musicologists have challenged this belief, advancing the view that many romantic triadic progressions exceed the reach of classical syntax and are mobilized as the result of a transgressive, anti-syntactic impulse. In Audacious Euphony, author Richard Cohn takes both of these views to task, arguing that romantic harmony operates under syntactic principles distinct from those that underlie classical tonality, but no less susceptible to systematic definition. Charting this alternative triadic syntax, Cohn reconceives what consonant triads are, and how they relate to one another. In doing so, he shows that major and minor triads have two distinct natures: one based on their acoustic properties, and the other on their ability to voice-lead smoothly to each other in the chromatic universe. Whereas their acoustic nature underlies the diatonic tonality of the classical tradition, their voice-leading properties are optimized by the pan-triadic progressions characteristic of the 19th century. Audacious Euphony develops a set of inter-related maps that organize intuitions about triadic proximity as seen through the lens of voice-leading proximity, using various geometries related to the 19th-century Tonnetz. This model leads to cogent analyses both of particular compositions and of historical trends across the long nineteenth century. Essential reading for music theorists, Audacious Euphony is also a valuable resource for music historians, performers and composers.

(Harp). Nearly two dozen favorites, including: Evergreen * From This Moment On * Lady * Let It Be Me * Never My Love * Send in the Clowns * Sunrise, Sunset * The Prayer * The Rose * The Wind Beneath My Wings * Through the Eyes of Love * and more. Playable on lever harps and pedal harps.

This Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music provides detailed and authoritative articles for the most important composers, concepts, genres, music educators, performers, theorists, writings, and works of cultivated music in Europe and the Americas during the period 1789-1914. The roster of biographical entries includes not only canonical composers such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chopin, Fauré, Grieg, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Rossini, Schubert, Robert Schumann, Sibelius, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Wagner, and Wolf, but also less-well-known distinguished contemporaries of those composers (among them George Whitefield Chadwick, Cécile Chaminade, Ernesto Elorduy, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Fanny Hensel, C. H. Parry, and Clara Schumann, to name but a few). Significant literary and cultural topics such as Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s theoretical writings of the 1850s, as well as entries on other cultural luminaries who significantly influenced music’s Romanticisms – among them J. S. Bach, Goethe, Haydn, Handel, Heine, Mozart, Schiller, and Shakespeare – are also included. Entries on important institutions (conservatory, orphéon, Männerchor), concepts (biographical fallacy, copyright, exoticism, feminism, nationalism, performance practice), and political caesurae and movements (First and Second French Empire, First, Second, and Third French Republic, Franco-Prussian War, Revolutions of 1848, Risorgimento) round out the dictionary section. Like other volumes in this series, this book's more than 500 entries are preceded by an introductory essay that explains the essential concepts necessary for understanding and exploring further the vast and complex musical landscape of Romanticism, plus a detailed Chronology. Concluding the volume is an extensive bibliography that lists the most important source-critical series of editions of Romantic music, important general writings on the period and its music, and composer-by-composer bibliographies.

Uncovers the unexplored history of the love song, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day, and discusses such topics as censorship, the legacy of love songs, and why it is a dominant form of modern musical expression.