The music of Edvard Grieg is justly celebrated for its harmonic richness, a feature especially apparent in the piano works written in the last decades of his life. Grieg was enchanted by what he styled the ’dreamworld’ of harmony, a magical realm whose principles the composer felt remained a mystery even to himself, and he was not alone, in that the complex nature of late-Romantic harmony around 1900 has proved a keen source of debate up to the present day. Grieg’s music forms a particularly profitable repertoire for focusing current debates about the nature of tonality and tonal harmony. Departing from earlier approaches, this study is not simply an inventory of Griegian harmonic traits but seeks rather to ascertain the deeper principles at work governing their meaningful conjunction, how elements of Grieg’s harmonic grammar are utilised in creating an extended tonal syntax. Building both on historical theories and more recent developments, Benedict Taylor develops new models for understanding the complexity of late-Romantic tonal practice as epitomised in Grieg’s music. Such an investigation casts further valuable light on the twin issues of nature and nationalism long connected with the composer: the question of tonality as something natural or culturally constructed and larger historiographical claims concerning Grieg’s apparent position on the periphery of the Austro-German tradition.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of music examples -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Enticements -- 1 Extending tonality: Klang, added-note harmonies and the emancipation of sonority -- 2 Modality and scalar modulation -- 3 Systematisation: Chromaticism, interval cycles and linear progressions -- Conclusion: Nature and nationalism -- Bibliography -- Index of Grieg's works cited -- General index

Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Music and Literature traces the transatlantic networks that were constructed between a select group of composers, including Edvard Grieg, Edward MacDowell, and Percy Grainger, and the writers with whom they shared cosmopolitan affinities, including Arne Garborg, Hamlin Garland, Madison Grant, and Lathrop Stoddard. Each overlapping case study surveys the diachronic transmission of cosmopolitanism as well as the synchronic practices that animated these modernist ideas. Instead of taking a strictly chronological approach to organization, each chapter offers an examination of the different layers of identity that expanded and contracted in relation to a mutual interest in Nordic culture. From the burgeoning “universal” ambitions around 1900 to the darker racialized discourse of the 1920s, this study offers a critical analysis of both the idea and practice of cosmopolitanism in order to expose its common foundations as well as the limits of its application.

This encyclopaedic book proposes a sweeping reformulation of the basic concepts of Western music theory, revealing simple structures underlying a wide range of practices from the Renaissance to contemporary pop. Its core innovation is a collection of simple geometrical models describing the implicit knowledge governing a broad range of music-making, much as the theory of grammar describes principles that tacitly guide our speaking and writing. Each of its central chapters re-examines a basic music-theoretical concept such as voice leading, repetition, nonharmonic tones, the origins of tonal harmony, the grammar of tonal harmony, modulation, and melody. These are flanked by two largely analytical chapters on rock harmony and Beethoven. Wide-ranging in scope, and with almost 700 musical examples from the Middle Ages to the present day, Tonality: An Owner's Manual weaves philosophy, mathematics, statistics, and computational analysis into a new and truly twenty-first century theory of music.

Music criticism in England underwent profound change from the 1880s to the 1920s. It gave rise to ‘New criticism’ that aimed to be rational, impartial and intellectually authoritative. It was a break from the criticism of old: the work of the opinionated journalist who wrote descriptive concert reviews with invective, cliché, bias and bombast. Critics such as Ernest Newman (1868–1959), John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and Michel D. Calvocoressi (1877–1944) fostered this new school and wrote extensively of their aspirations for musical criticism in their own times and for the future. This book charts the genesis of this new wave of musical criticism that sought to regulate and reform the profession of music critic. Alongside the establishment of principles, training manuals and schools for critics, hundreds of journal articles and dozens of books were written that encouraged new criticism, which also had a bearing on scholarly writing in biography, aesthetics and history. The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England considers the influence and advocacy of individual critics and the role that institutions, such as the Musical Association and the Musical Times, played in this period of change. The book also explores the impact that French and German writers had on their English counterparts, demonstrating the internationalization of critical thought of the period.

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) was Victorian Britain’s most celebrated and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan’s reputation is chiefly based have been consistently belittled or ignored by the British musicological establishment, while his serious works have until recently remained virtually unknown. The time is thus long overdue for scholarly re-engagement with Sullivan. The present book offers a new appraisal of the music of this most notable nineteenth-century British composer, combining close analytical attention to his music with critical consideration of the wider aesthetic and social context to his work. Focusing on key pieces in all the major genres in which Sullivan composed, it includes accounts of his most important serious works – the music to The Tempest, the ‘Irish’ Symphony, The Golden Legend, Ivanhoe – alongside detailed examination of the celebrated comic operas created with W.S. Gilbert to present a balanced portrayal of Sullivan’s musical achievement.

England in the fifteenth century was the cradle of much that would have a profound impact on European music for the next several hundred years. Perhaps the greatest such development was the cyclic cantus firmus Mass, and scholarly attention has therefore often been drawn to identifying potentially English examples within the many anonymous Mass cycles that survive in continental sources. Nonetheless, to understand English music in this period is to understand it within a changing nexus of two-way cultural exchange with the continent, and the genre of the Mass cycle is very much at the forefront of this. Indeed, the question of ‘what is English’ cannot truly be answered without also answering the question of ‘what is continental’. This book seeks, initially, to answer both of these questions. Perhaps more importantly, it argues that a number of the works that have induced the most scholarly debate are best seen through the lens of intensive and long-term cultural exchange and that the great binary divide of provenance can, in many cases, productively be broken down. A great many of these works, though often written on the continent, can, it seems, only be understood in relation to English practice – a practice which has had, and will continue to have, major importance in the ongoing history of European Art Music.