Award-winning examination of Beethoven's music.

"Definitive study of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert by an award-winning author.

Ranging widely over classical music, jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of new resources for understanding music. In this accessible and eloquently written book, he argues boldly that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. He demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. First published in 2001, Musical Meaning anticipates many of the musicological topics of today, including race, performance, embodiment, and media. In addition, Kramer explores music itself as a source of understanding via his composition Revenants for piano, revised for this edition and available on the UC Press website.

Beethoven's late style is the language of his ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the Diabelli Variations, the Bagatelles, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, and several smaller piano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between the Classical and Romantic traditions: in terms of their musical structure, they continue to be regarded as revolutionary. Spitzer's book examines these late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the German intellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflicting approaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from various approaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning, relating Adorno to such writers as Derrida, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as contemporary music theorists. Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (including neo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's last works offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doing so created the musical language of premodernism.

This book looks closely at both Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge, placing both in their historical and social contexts. It considers interesting questions about whether absolute music--music without words--can have meaning and speculates that some works of Western music can evoke synesthesia in listeners--a sense of motion through three-dimensional volumes of space. The author also speculates that Beethoven's long creative dry spell in his late 40s was caused by an extended bout with clinical depression.

"It was high time that someone tried to explain more fully, and on the basis of the known documents, the course of Beethoven's meteoric rise to fame in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century. . . . I would consider this cleverly written and authoritative book to be the most important about Beethoven in twenty-five years. No one considering the subject will be able to overlook DeNora's research."—H.C. Robbins Landon, author of Beethoven: His Life, Work, and World "This is a study with the power to reshape our perceptions of Beethoven's first decade in Vienna and substantially refine our notions of the creation and foundations of Beethoven's career."—William Meredith, Ira Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San Jose State University "Professor DeNora's achievement in placing Beethoven, and the reception of Beethoven's music, in social context is all the more impressive because it goes so much against the grain of conventional habits of thought. In illuminating how changing social institutions created opportunities for Beethoven to gain contemporary and posthumous recognition, and, in so doing, created new forms for thinking and talking about musical achievement—the author at once provides fresh insights into the institutional origins of 'classical' music and offers an exemplary contribution to the sociological study of the arts."—Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University "An important landmark in our understanding of the relationship of the creative musician to society, and a vital contribution to debates about the central phenomenon which distinguishes Western music from other musical traditions: the phenomenon of the Great Composer."—Julian Rushton, University of Leeds "This original book argues that Beethoven's high reputation was created as much by the social-cultural agendas of his aristocratic Viennese patrons in the 1790s as by the qualities of his music. DeNora's persuasive reading of this momentous cultural-artistic event will be welcome to sociologists for its successful contextualization of a hero of 'absolute music,' as well as to musicologists and music-lovers who wish to move beyond the myth of Beethoven as 'the man who freed music.'"—James Webster, Cornell University "Lucid, well-researched, and theoretically informed, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius is one of the best works yet published in the historical sociology of culture. DeNora makes important contributions not only to our knowledge of Beethoven and of the social construction of genius but to the general problems of how identities are created, shaped, and sustained and of how aesthetic claims gain authority."—Craig Calhoun, University of North Carolina

A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012 A New Yorker Best Book of the Year Los Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the Year This revelatory book of music history examines what is perhaps the best known and most-popular symphony ever written—and its famous four-note opening. Reaching back before Beethoven’s time, Matthew Guerrieri uncovers premonitions of the opening notes in the rhythms of ancient Greek poetry and the music of the French Revolution. He discusses the Fifth’s impact when it premiered, tracing the artistic, philosophical, and political reverberations across Europe to China, Russia, and the United States, from Romanticism to ring tones, from propaganda to pop. This fascinating piece of musical detective work is a treat for music lovers of every stripe.

Examines America's early reception to Beethoven, the use of his work and image in American music, movies, stage works, and other forms of popular culture, and related topics.

Written for the general reader, this book reveals how Beethoven's great works reflect both his artistic individuality and the deepest philosophical and political currents of his age.

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.