What does it feel like to perform music? Are there aspects of performance that remain mysterious even to the musicians themselves? What elements are open to scrutiny, experiment, and improvement? This
What makes a classical song a song? In a wide-ranging 2004 discussion, covering such contrasting composers as Brahms and Berberian, Schubert and Kurtág, Jonathan Dunsby considers the nature of vocality in songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essence and scope of poetic and literary meaning in the Lied tradition is subjected to close scrutiny against the backdrop of 'new musicological' thinking and music-theoretical orthodoxies. The reader is thus offered the best insights available within an evidence-based approach to musical discourse. Schoenberg figures conspicuously as both songsmith and theorist, and some easily comprehensible Schenkerian approaches are used to convey ideas of musical time and expressive focus. In this work of scholarship and theoretical depth, Professor Dunsby's highly original approach and engaging style will ensure its appeal to all practising musicians and students of Romantic and modern music.
Pierrot Lunaire (1912) is one of the most important music theatre works ever written. This is the first guide in English to a work which continues to be performed, broadcast and recorded worldwide. The book describes the artistic environment around the turn of the century from which Pierrot emerged and discusses Schoenberg's working methods and intentions in its composition. The composer's artistic development up to 1912 is contemplated as a backdrop to this extraordinarily original creative act, and the significance of Pierrot in the unfolding of twentieth-century music is a recurrent topic of the text. In a clear and imaginative description of the work itself, the author takes each of the 21 melodramas in turn, considering both the music and the narrative. The text of all 21 poems is provided in German and in a new English translation by Andrew Porter.
The Dawn of Music Semiology showcases the work of ten leading musicologists, inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, the founding father of music semiology. Now entering its fifth decade as Natt
Order and Disorder is the result of the first International Orpheus Academy for Music Theory, held in 2003. Its theme was 20th century music and theory, especially after the 1950s. Five guest lecture
