Overview
Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited.Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.
Full Product Details
Author: Paul Berry (Assistant Professor of Music, Assistant Professor of Music, Yale University, Hamden, CT)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.60cm
, Height: 3.30cm
, Length: 16.00cm
Weight: 0.726kg
ISBN: 9780199982646
ISBN 10: 0199982643
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 11 September 2014
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
""Strongly recommended...""--Classical.net ""[T]his book offers great rewards for those interested in Brahms and his milieu. There is evidence of sensitive engagement with Brahms's music in every chapter, and the forays into biography and cultural history are generally entertaining and enlightening. Berry has made a significant contribution to the project of humanizing Brahms for twenty-first-century scholars and listeners.""--Notes
Strongly recommended... --Classical.net [T]his book offers great rewards for those interested in Brahms and his milieu. There is evidence of sensitive engagement with Brahms's music in every chapter, and the forays into biography and cultural history are generally entertaining and enlightening. Berry has made a significant contribution to the project of humanizing Brahms for twenty-first-century scholars and listeners. --Notes
Strongly recommended... --Classical.net
Author Information
Paul Berry is Assistant Professor (Adjunct) of Music History at the Yale School of Music. A historian of chamber music and song in 19th-century Germany and Austria, he received his BA and Ph.D. from Yale University and has served on the faculty of the University of North Texas College of Music. He is also active as a tenor, specializing in early music, German Lieder, and new music.
