Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and 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 structure, through questions of tradition and genre, to consideration of the symphony as a narrative alongside other contemporary non-musical texts.

The first book to examine Schubert's songs as active shaping forces in the culture of their era rather than a mere reflection of it. His songs project a kaleidoscopic array of unexpected human types, all of whom are eligible for a sympathetic response. Kramer shows how Schubert sought to validate these types in his songs.

Schenker's Interpretive Practice is the first comprehensive study of this century's most influential music theorist, Heinrich Schenker. Robert Snarrenberg examines Schenker's texts and the roots of his approach, situating Schenker's work in the broader context of his desire to portray the richness and particularity of musical experience.

Heinrich Schenker's theoretical and analytical method occupies a central (and often troubling) position in modern Anglo-American musical studies. 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, such as the psychological and historical investigations of music.

The writings of Sulzer and Koch represent a significant confluence of philosophical and musical thought from the German Enlightenment. Koch creatively adapted many of Sulzer's abstract philosophical ideas to concrete questions of musical pedagogy, showing how they could be usefully applied to the teaching and analysis of musical composition.

This book is the first to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period. Challenging conventional interpretations, the book shows that Stravinsky's serial music is not only of great historical significance, but also of astonishing structural originality and emotional power.

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.

A selection of the writings of A. B. Marx, one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Includes material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica'.

This is the first intellectual biography of the French composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who synthesised the vocabulary and grammar of musical practice into a concise scientific system, earning himself the popular title of 'Newton of the Arts'. The author examines Rameau's accomplishments in the context of the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century.

Taking Renaissance theorists' music examples as a point of departure, this study explores fundamental questions about how music was read, and by whom, in specific cultural contexts. In particular it illuminates the ways in which the choices of Renaissance theorists have shaped later interpretation of earlier praxis.

This book explores the work of three significant American composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It offers information on their lives and music and skilfully interweaves history and musical analysis in ways that both the specialist and the more general reader will find compelling.

This English translation of Musical Dilettante offers a most comprehensive view of galant composition available in a single volume and serves not only as a theoretical treatise but a record of the aesthetic and musical values of the day.

This book employs Romantic poetics as well as more recent critical thought to examine Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe of 1840, one of the most enigmatic works in the Western musical repertoire. The book attempts to introduce into musicology a hermeneutic that seeks to synthesize philosophical, literary-critical, music-analytical and psycho-analytical modes of thought.

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.

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.