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Normalizing The Abnormal: Disability In Music And Music Theory, Joseph N. Straus
Normalizing The Abnormal: Disability In Music And Music Theory, Joseph N. Straus
Publications and Research
The emerging interdisciplinary field of disability studies takes as its subject matter the historical, social, and cultural construction of disability. After a brief introduction to disability studies, this article explores the interconnected histories of disability and music as they are manifested in three theoretical approaches to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western art music (the musical Formenlehre and the tonal theories of Schoenberg and Schenker) and in three works by Beethoven and Schubert. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, disability began to be understood not as something natural and permanent but rather as a deviation from …
The "Anxiety Of Influence" In Twentieth-Century Music, Joseph N. Straus
The "Anxiety Of Influence" In Twentieth-Century Music, Joseph N. Straus
Publications and Research
The musical world of this century has been dominated, to an extraordinary and unprecedented degree, by the music of the past. Performers play music primarily by long-deceased canonical composers, composers learn their craft by studying the master-works of the past, including the distant past, and scholars devote themselves to studying increasingly ancient musical monuments. The past has never been so powerfully present as in this century. In this historical situation, composers have felt an understandably deep ambivalence toward the masterworks of the past. On the hand, those masterworks inspire admiration, even reverence. At the same time, they also inspire the …
The Progress Of A Motive In Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Joseph N. Straus
The Progress Of A Motive In Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Joseph N. Straus
Publications and Research
The progress of this passage from sketch to final version follows what for Stravinsky is a reasonably common pattern in the composition of The Rake's Progress. The initial sketches tend to be rhythmically square and harmonically rudimentary. They often have the appearance of a simple, classical prototype. As musical ideas are brought to a more final state, the sketches often become increasingly free rhythmically and increasingly remote from classical tonal norms harmonically. A significant aspect of Stravinsky's compositional process in The Rake's Progress, as documented by the sketches, involves the explicit transformation of relatively traditional tonal prototypes. In …
Heinrich Schenker As An Interpreter Of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, William Rothstein
Heinrich Schenker As An Interpreter Of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, William Rothstein
Publications and Research
There was a time when it seemed necessary for admirers of the work of Heinrich Schenker to remind the musical community periodically that it had grown out of a lifetime of practical musical experience—that is, that Der freie Satz did not represent a self-contained system of theoretical speculation. Schenker himself tried repeatedly throughout his career to impress this point upon his readers. In recent years, fortunately, this reminder—which had threatened to become merely ritualistic—has become somewhat less necessary. The change in Schenker's reputation may, it seems, be dated precisely to 1975, when Dover Publications issued an inexpensive reprint of his …