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  3. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis

A series designed for those interested in the theoretical and intellectual issues of music, whether as historians of ideas, as practical analysts, or as theoreticians. The series includes full-length analyses of works (individual or collective); scholarly translations of major theoretical texts, with editorial commentary; studies in the history of theory; and newly formulated theoretical constructs

  • General Editors: Ian Bent

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9 results in Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis

Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music
  • David Kopp
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    31 October 2002
  • David Kopp's book develops a model of chromatic chord relations in nineteenth-century music by composers such as Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms. The emphasis is on explaining chromatic third relations and the pivotal role they play in theory and practice. The book traces conceptions of harmonic system and of chromatic third relations from Rameau through nineteenth-century theorists such as Marx, Hauptmann and Riemann, to the seminal twentieth-century theorists Schenker and Schoenberg and on to the present day. Drawing on tenets of nineteenth-century harmonic theory, contemporary transformation theory and the author's own approach, the book presents a clear and elegant means for characterizing commonly acknowledged but loosely defined elements of chromatic harmony, and integrates them as fully fledged entities into a chromatically based conception of harmonic system. The historical and theoretical argument is supplemented by plentiful analytic examples.

Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven
  • Selected Writings on Theory and Method
  • A. B. Marx
  • Edited by Scott Burnham
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    04 December 1997
  • A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Drawing on idealist aesthetics and the ideology of Bildung, he developed a holistic pedagogical method as well as a theory of musical form that gives pride of place to Beethoven. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented here in English for the first time. It features Marx's oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the last two centuries: the relation of form and content, the analysis of instrumental music, the role of pedagogy in music theory, and the nature of musical understanding.

Schenker's Interpretive Practice
  • Robert Snarrenberg
  • Published online:
    02 November 2009
    Print publication:
    28 May 1997
  • Schenker's Interpretive Practice is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker. Since the 1960s, American theorists and musicologists have focused almost exclusively on analytical methods distilled from Schenker's writings. Breaking from that tradition, Robert Snarrenberg returns to Schenker's texts and to the humanist roots of his approach, situating Schenker's work in the broader context of his desire to portray the richness and particularity of musical experience. Snarrenberg concentrates on four aims that Schenker hoped to achieve: to present a theoretical account of musical effects encountered in European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to represent the mindset shared among composers of that music, to convey the expressive interaction of musical effects in individual artwork, and to promote continued creative and re-creative participation in the musical tradition.Author recipient of the 1998 Young Scholar Award from the Society of Music Theory.

Schenker's Argument and the Claims of Music Theory
  • Leslie David Blasius
  • Published online:
    28 October 2009
    Print publication:
    03 October 1996
  • Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical works claim to resubstantiate the unique artistic presence of the canonic work, and thus reject those musical disciplines such as psychoacoustics and systematic musicology which derive from the natural sciences. In this respect his writing reflects the counter-positivism endemic to the German academic discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century. The rhetoric of this stance, however, conceals a sophisticated programme wherein Schenker situates his project in relation to these sciences, arguing his reading of the musical text as a synthesis of a descriptive psychology and an explanatory historiography (which itself embeds both paleographic and philological assumptions). This book rereads Schenker's project as an attempt to reconstruct music theory as a discipline against the background of the empirical musical sciences of the later nineteenth century.

Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment
  • Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch
  • Heinrich Christoph Koch, Johann Georg Sulzer
  • Edited by Nancy Baker, Thomas Christensen
  • Published online:
    30 September 2009
    Print publication:
    21 March 1996
  • Can an abstract theory of Empfindsamkeit aesthetics have any value to a musician wishing to study composition in the classical style? The eighteenth-century German theorist and pedagogue Heinrich Koch showed how this question could be answered with a resounding yes. Starting with the systematic aesthetic theory of the Swiss encyclopedist Johann Sulzer, Koch was creatively able to adapt Sulzer's conservative ideas on ethical mimesis and rhetoric to concrete problems of music analysis and composition. In this collaborative study, Thomas Christensen and Nancy Baker have translated and analysed selected writings of Sulzer and Koch respectively, bringing to life a little-known confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch's appropriation of Sulzer's ideas to the service of music represents an important development in the evolution of Western musical thought.

Mahler's Sixth Symphony
  • A Study in Musical Semiotics
  • Robert Samuels
  • Published online:
    17 November 2009
    Print publication:
    14 December 1995
  • The terms of structuralist and post-structuralist theory have been widely debated within the field of music analysis in recent years. However, very few analyses have attempted to address the repertoire of large orchestral works of the turn of the century - works which seem most obviously to escape the categories of conventional analysis. This study uses a semiotic theory of signification in order to investigate different types of musical communication. Musical meaning is defined on several levels from structures immanent to the work, through questions of tradition and genre, to consideration of the symphony as a narrative alongside other contemporary non-musical texts. Ideas from Eco, Barthes, and Derrida are deployed within the context of close analysis of the score in order to unite specifically analytical insights with cultural hermeneutics.

The Musical Dilettante
  • A Treatise on Composition by J. F. Daube
  • Johann Friedrich Daube
  • Edited by Susan P. Snook-Luther
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 June 1992
  • This is an English translation of Johann Friedrich Daube's Musical Dilettante: A Treatise on Composition (Vienna, 1773). Written as a practical, comprehensive guide for aristocratic dilettantes wishing to compose instrumental chamber music for their social entertainment, the treatise covers genres from duets to double fugues, and includes the earliest instruction in string quartets and idiomatic orchestration of symphonies. Daube's Musical Dilettante has long been overlooked due to his better-known Thorough-Bass in Three Chords (1756). Nevertheless, Musical Dilettante is the keystone of Daube's theoretical writing, and offers a most comprehensive view of galant composition available in a single volume. The signature of Musical Dilettante is its unique textural emphasis and Daube's examples sparkle with concertante interplay, conversational part-writing and idiomatic instrumentation. These features combine to create a volume which is not only a theoretical treatise but a record of the aesthetic and musical values of the day.

Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings
  • Ernst Kurth
  • Edited by Lee A. Rothfarb
  • Published online:
    10 December 2009
    Print publication:
    26 July 1991
  • This book provides a selection of annotated translations from Ernst Kurth's three best-known publications: Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (1917), Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners 'Tristan' (1920), and Bruckner (1925). Kurth's contemporaries considered these books to be pioneering studies in the music of J. S. Bach, Wagner and Bruckner. Professor Rothfarb's extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural environment in which Kurth was writing, referring to aspects of the early twentieth-century cultural renewal movements and to intellectual developments of the day in phenomenology, aesthetics and psychology. By reading Kurth against the cultural-intellectual background provided in the essay and commentaries, today's music historians and theorists can round out their picture of music theory in the early twentieth century.

Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style
  • Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music
  • James Webster
  • Published online:
    28 January 2010
    Print publication:
    26 July 1991
  • This volume offers a new view of Joseph Haydn's instrumental music. It argues that many of Haydn's greatest and most characteristic instrumental works are 'through-composed' in the sense that their several movements are bound together into a cycle. This cyclic integration is articulated, among other ways, by the 'progressive' form of individual movements, structural and gestural links between the movements, and extramusical associations. Central to the study is a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the 'Farewell' Symphony, No. 45 in F sharp minor (1772). The analysis is distinguished by its systematic use of different methods (Toveyan formalism, Schenkerian voice leading, Schoenbergian developing variation) to elucidate the work's overall coherence. The work's unique musical processes, in turn, suggest an interpretation of the entire piece (not merely the famous 'farewell' finale) in terms of the familiar programmatic story of the musicians' wish to leave Castle Eszterhaza. In a book which relates systematically the results of analysis and interpretation, Professor Webster challenges the concept of 'classical style' which, he argues has distorted our understanding of Haydn's development, and he stresses the need for a greater appreciation of Haydn's early music and of his stature as Beethoven's equal.