Chamber Music

Marie Sumner Lott examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. Her social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvorák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, Sumner Lott reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment. Insightful and groundbreaking, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

In 1829 Goethe famously described the string quartet as 'a conversation among four intelligent people'. Inspired by this metaphor, Edward Klorman's study draws on a wide variety of documentary and iconographic sources to explore Mozart's chamber works as 'the music of friends'. Illuminating the meanings and historical foundations of comparisons between chamber music and social interplay, Klorman infuses the analysis of sonata form and phrase rhythm with a performer's sensibility. He develops a new analytical method called multiple agency that interprets the various players within an ensemble as participants in stylized social intercourse - characters capable of surprising, seducing, outwitting, and even deceiving one another musically. This book is accompanied by online resources that include original recordings performed by the author and other musicians, as well as video analyses that invite the reader to experience the interplay in time, as if from within the ensemble.

This book presents a systematic discussion of hypermeter and phrase structure in eighteenth-century music. It combines perspectives from historical and modern music theory with insights from the cognitive study of music and introduces a dynamic model of hypermeter, which allows the analyst to trace the effect of hypermetric manipulations in real time. This model is applied in analyses of string chamber music by Haydn and Mozart. The analyses shed a new light upon this celebrated musical repertoire, but the aim of this book goes far beyond an analytical survey of specific compositions. Rather, it is to give a comprehensive account of the ways in which phrase structure and hypermeter were described by eighteenth-century music theorists, conceived by eighteenth-century composers, and perceived by eighteenth-century listeners.

Winner of the 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award In 1796 the young Beethoven presented his first two cello sonatas, Op. 5, at the court of Frederick William II, an avid cellist and the reigning Prussian monarch. Released in print the next year, these revolutionary sonatas forever altered the cello repertoire by fundamentally redefining the relationship between the cello and the piano and promoting their parity. Beethoven continued to develop the potential of the duo partnership in his three other cello sonatas - the lyrical and heroic Op. 69 and the two experimental sonatas Op. 102, No. 1 and No. 2, transcendent compositions conceived on the threshold of the composer's late style. In Beethoven's Cello, Marc D. Moskovitz and R. Larry Todd examine these seminal cornerstones of the cello repertoire and place them within their historical and cultural contexts. Also addressed arethe three variation sets and, in a series of interludes, the cellos owned by Beethoven, the changing nature of his pianos, the cello-centric 'Triple' Concerto and the arrangements for cello and piano of other works. Featuring a preface by renowned cellist Steven Isserlis and concluding with the reviews of the composer's cello music published during his lifetime, Beethoven's Cello is the ideal companion for cellists, pianists, musicologists and chamber-music devotees desiring a comprehensive understanding of this beloved repertoire. MARC D. MOSKOVITZ is principal cellist of the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra. He has recorded the music of virtuoso cellists David Popperand Alfredo Piatti for the VAI label, and his American premiere of Zemlinsky's Cello Sonata was heralded by the Washington Post as 'an impassioned performance'. Moskovitz has contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; and his biography, Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony, was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2010. Recognized as 'Mendelssohn's most authoritative biographer' (The New Yorker), R. LARRY TODD is Arts and Sciences Professor at Duke University. He is the author of Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, named Best Biography in 2003 by the Association of American Publishers, and Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn, awarded the ASCAP Nicholas Slonimsky Award for outstanding biography in music. As a pianist, he has recorded with Nancy Green the complete cello works of Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel for JRI Recordings.