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  3. Music in Context

The aim of Music in Context is to illuminate specific musical works, repertoires or practices in historical, critical, socio-economic or other contexts; or to illuminate particular cultural and critical contexts in which music operates through the study of specific musical works, repertoires or practices. A specific musical focus is essential, while avoiding the decontextualisation of traditional aesthetics and music analysis. The series title invites engagement with both its main terms; the aim is to challenge notions of what contexts are appropriate or necessary in studies of music, and to extend the conceptual framework of musicology into other disciplines or into new theoretical directions.

  • General Editors: Benedict Taylor, University of Edinburgh
  • Founding Editors: Julian Rushton, University of Leeds Emeritus
  • Editor Emerituss: J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Royal Holloway, University of London Emeritus

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23 results in Music in Context

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Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets
  • Opp. 59, 74 and 95
  • Nancy November
  • Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    09 January 2014
  • Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses, she explores ways in which the quartets have both reflected and shaped the very idea of chamber music and offers a new historical understanding of the works' physical, visual, social and ideological aspects. In the process, November provides a fresh critique of three key paradigms in current Beethoven studies: the focus on his late period; the emphasis on 'heroic' style in discussions of the middle period; and the idea of string quartets as 'pure', 'autonomous' artworks, cut off from social moorings. Importantly, this study shows that the quartets encompass a new lyric and theatrical impetus, which is an essential part of their unique, explorative character.

The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism
  • Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton
  • J. P. E. Harper-Scott
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    16 August 2012
  • Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, which embraces all the music of Western modernity. This systematic definition of musical modernism introduces readers to theory by Badiou, Žižek and Agamben. Basing his analyses on the music of William Walton, Harper-Scott explores connections between the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and responses to the event of modernism in order to challenge accepted narratives of music history in the twentieth century.

Mozart's Requiem
  • Reception, Work, Completion
  • Simon P. Keefe
  • Published online:
    05 July 2012
    Print publication:
    28 June 2012
  • Presenting a fresh interpretation of Mozart's Requiem, Simon P. Keefe redresses a longstanding scholarly imbalance whereby narrow consideration of the text of this famously incomplete work has taken precedence over consideration of context in the widest sense. Keefe details the reception of the Requiem legend in general writings, fiction, theatre and film, as well as discussing criticism, scholarship and performance. Evaluation of Mozart's work on the Requiem turns attention to the autograph score, the document in which myths and musical realities collide. Franz Xaver Süssmayr's completion (1791–2) is also re-appraised and the ideological underpinnings of modern completions assessed. Overall, the book affirms that Mozart's Requiem, fascinating for interacting musical, biographical, circumstantial and psychological reasons, cannot be fully appreciated by studying only Mozart's activities. Broad-ranging hermeneutic approaches to the work, moreover, supersede traditionally limited discursive confines.

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