Bücher der Reihe Eastern European Studies in Musicology

The book focuses on the Jesuits' positive understanding of the role of music culture, which is evident in both theory and artistic practice related to pastoral care and education. It contributed to an unprecedented flourishing of many different disciplines of art, including music, viewed as a universal tool for social action and communication.

This investigation of Polish, Jewish, and German sources demonstrates the roles of music in occupied Poland. Its former citizens had their access to music controlled by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. It was rationed as other goods, depending on racial (i.e. also legal) status. Official music performances served as a propagandistic tool to further divide the Nazi-segregated population. Music played clandestinely embodied resistance. It restored the sense of community and helped save musicians persecuted as Jews, like W¿adys¿aw Szpilman. The documents analyzed in the monograph confirm the dehumanization of prospective victims, mixed with a narcissistic self-righteous view of Nazi songs and propaganda ultimately led to the organized presence of music in the Holocaust sites.

Antonín Dvöák was a clever and highly communicative humorist and musical dramatist. His masterful compositional strategies underscore, heighten, and construct sonic humor in his six (!!) comic operas. He crafts musical slapstick, satire, parody, and merriment using sudden breaks in rhythmic patterns, explosive harmonic shifts, excessive repetition, and startling pauses, as well as incongruous tempi, dynamics, range, and instrumentation. Dvöák also gives the orchestra its own "voice," breaking the metaphorical "fourth wall" to reveal humor outside of the characters' awareness. Narrative description and comprehensive music examples guide the reader through all six of Dvöák's works in this genre, revealing a significantly under-appreciated side of the composer's immense creative skills.

Queen Marie Casimire Sobieska settled in Rome in 1699 where in Palazzo Zuccari she staged operas and occasional musical works, highly acclaimed by the Romans. This manifested her social status, political plans, and sublime aesthetic tastes. She commissioned such admired artists as Carlo S. Capece, Filippo Juvarra, and Domenico Scarlatti.

This is an extensive and thorough survey of the Venetian instrumental concerto of the Baroque era. It provides sufficient details to identify composers of lesser and greater stature, but also to pinpoint relationships, similarities and stylistic differences between various authors and localities.

For centuries, the dispute over time has concerned mainly its objective and relative character. For the author, besides philosophy and science, the principal point of reference is man, the way he exists in time and space, and the way he observes, senses and organises those domains, as documented in the products of musical activity.

This book concerns the ways in which nationalism, chauvinism and racism penetrated into musical thought in the interwar period. The impact of these ideologies on the reflection on music has been discussed on the example of four countries of various social-political systems and ethnic backgroud: Germany, Italy, Poland and Great Britain.

The author discusses various forms of musical activity of nuns in the 17th and 18th century: plainsong, polyphony, vocal-instrumental, chamber, and keyboard music. To consider the role of music in liturgy, monastic events, and everyday life, she describes the recruitment of musically gifted candidates and the scriptorial activity of nuns.

This book draws attention to the reception of Oskar Kolberg's folklorist's work outside of Poland. It also presents the work of other scholars active in Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day and reflects on how Kolberg's work is being continued by scholars today and how the musical repertoire that he recorded is functioning.

This book focuses on the relationship between identity and music in Europe from different angles. It takes two basic categories into account: identities in music and music in identities. The authors provide studies on identity construction in different historical and geographical contexts.

The monograph covers the history of the only strictly scientific Polish musicological periodical. The subject allows the author to present the beginnings of Polish musicology and its evolution through three epochs: the late partitioning period, the interwar period of Poland's independence, and the early years after the Second World War.

This book is the first monograph on Ignacy Jan Paderewski as composer. It reveals the evolution of his style and aesthetics in context of European music culture of the second half of 19th and first decades of 20th-century.

The volume includes detailed studies concerning various aspects of the musical culture of Silesia from the fifteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. The authors, who represent academic centres in Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Holland, France and Great Britain, present new sources, as well as reinterpreting previously known facts and phenomena.

This history of twentieth-century musical modernism emphasizes musical structure in its cultural context. The book uses several methodological models according to different interpretations of the subsequent phases of the twentieth-century musical modernism.

Musical rhetoric is an important phenomenon in Polish baroque music. The achievements of old Polish masters were determined by the main trends of the baroque era. Polish music provides examples of almost all rhetorical figures known at that time, largely reflecting the European repertoire of interpretative devices.

Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, and availing themselves of a broad range of methodological approaches, the authors provide interdisciplinary reflections on the soundscapes of selected European cities in the year 1945, through representation in autobiographical texts and art, and through reception and transformation.

This book is an attempt at a new interpretation of Stravinsky's thoughts about music and art, an interpretation made in dialogue with the philosophy of new music and 19th-century artistic ideas.

This book is the first monographic study of Tadeusz Baird - one of the greatest Polish composers of the second half of the 20th century. The study is an extensive, monographic representation of the composer's work and concepts in their stylistic, cultural, and esthetic contexts.

This book is the first monographic study of 19th-century transcriptions of Chopin's music. The study is based on the rich source material, which formed the basis for considerations from the perspective of social history, music analysis and aesthetics. This work reveals an important document of Chopin's music reception in the 19th century.

The book discusses the history and music of Gdansk carillons. It contains valuable information on bells, carillon mechanisms, bell founders, carillonists, and bell setters, inviting the reader to study the Protestant repertoire, the unique notation of preserved manuscripts, and the remarkable soundscape of Gdansk.

This is a monograph on one of the key aspects of Poland's musical culture during the Stalinist period. Among the many texts analysed in this book are addresses given by leading party officials, minutes of musical conferences, talks before concerts, papers on aesthetics and music history.