With their insistence that form is a dialectical process in the music of Beethoven, Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus emerge as the guardians of a long-standing critical tradition in which Hegelian concepts have been brought to bear on the question of musical form. Janet Schmalfeldt's ground-breaking account of the development of this Beethoven-Hegelian tradition restores to the term "form" some of its philosophical associations in the early nineteenth century, when profound cultural changes were yielding new relationships between composers and their listeners, and when music itself-in particular, instrumental music-became a topic for renewed philosophical investigation. Precedents for Adorno's and Dahlhaus's concept of form as process arise in the Athenäum Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel and in the Encyclopaedia Logic of Hegel. The metaphor common to all these sources is the notion of becoming; it is the idea of form coming into being that this study explores in respect to music by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann. A critical assessment of Dahlhaus's preoccupation with the opening of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata serves as the author's starting point for the translation of philosophical ideas into music-analytical terms-ones that encourage listening "both forward and backward," as Adorno has recommended. Thanks to the ever-growing familiarity of late eighteenth-century audiences with formal conventions, composers could increasingly trust that performers and listeners would be responsive to striking formal transformations. The author's analytic method strives to capture the dynamic, quasi-narrative nature of such transformations, rather than only their end results. This experiential approach to the perception of form invites listeners and especially performers to participate in the interpretation of processes by which, for example, a brooding introduction-like opening must inevitably become the essential main theme in Schubert's Sonata, Op. 42, or in which tremendous formal expansions in movements by Mendelssohn offer a dazzling opportunity for multiple retrospective reinterpretations. Above all, In the Process of Becoming proposes new ways of hearing beloved works of the romantic generation as representative of their striving for novel, intensely self-reflective modes of communication.

This book proposes a new model for understanding the musical work, which includes interpretation -- both analysis- and performance-based -- as an integral component.

This volume brings together analyses of works by thirteen Russian composers from across the twentieth century, showing how their approaches to tonality, modernism, and serialism forge forward-looking paths independent from their Western counterparts. Russian music of this era is widely performed, and much research has situated this repertoire in its historical and social context, yet few analytical studies have explored the technical aspects of these composers' styles. With a set of representative analyses by leading scholars in music theory and analysis, this book for the first time identifies large-scale compositional trends in Russian music since 1900. The chapters progress by compositional style through the century, and each addresses a single work by a different composer, covering pieces by Rachmaninoff, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mansurian, Roslavets, Mosolov, Lourié, Tcherepnin, Ustvolskaya, Denisov, Gubaidulina, and Schnittke. Musicians, scholars, and students will find here a starting point for research and analysis of these composers' works and gain a richer understanding of how to listen to and interpret their music.

This study analyzes chamber music from Mozart's time within its highly social salon-performance context.

Focusing on the core composers of the 19th century, this text provides an overview of the repertoire & keyboard technique of the era. This new edition includes a chapter on women composers, in particular Fanny Hensel & Clara Schumann.

Music and the Mind brings together an outstanding, international team of authorities from the fields of music and psychology, to celebrate the life and work of John Sloboda. In addition the book reviews and takes stock of where the field of music psychology stands 25 years after Sloboda's classic work 'The Musical Mind' first appeared.