Expertly arranged piano solo from our Kalmus Edition.

Elements of Sonata Theory is a comprehensive, richly detailed rethinking of the basic principles of sonata form in the decades around 1800. This foundational study draws upon the joint strengths of current music history and music theory to outline a new, up-to-date paradigm for understanding the compositional choices found in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries: sonatas, chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos. In so doing, it also lays out the indispensable groundwork for anyone wishing to confront the later adaptations and deformations of these basic structures in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Combining insightful music analysis, contemporary genre theory, and provocative hermeneutic turns, the book brims over with original ideas, bold and fresh ways of awakening the potential meanings within a familiar musical repertory. Sonata Theory grasps individual compositions-and each of the individual moments within them-as creative dialogues with an implicit conceptual background of flexible, ever-changing historical norms and patterns. These norms may be recreated as constellations "compositional defaults," any of which, however, may be stretched, strained, or overridden altogether for individualized structural or expressive purposes. This book maps out the terrain of that conceptual background, against which what actually happens-or does not happen-in any given piece may be assessed and measured. The Elements guides the reader through the standard (and less-than-standard) formatting possibilities within each compositional space in sonata form, while also emphasizing the fundamental role played by processes of large-scale circularity, or "rotation," in the crucially important ordering of musical modules over an entire movement. The book also illuminates new ways of understanding codas and introductions, of confronting the generating processes of minor-mode sonatas, and of grasping the arcs of multimovement cycles as wholes. Its final chapters provide individual studies of alternative sonata types, including "binary" sonata structures, sonata-rondos, and the "first-movement form" of Mozart's concertos.

The first detailed contextual study of Beethoven's middle-period quartets, encompassing reception history, early performance practices, aesthetic contexts and theatrical impetus.

The first two volumes of Heinrich Schenker's masterwork Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, Harmonielehren (1906), and Kontrapunkt (1910 and 1922), laid the foundations for the harmonic aspect of his theory. The specific voice-leading component was a later development, progressing with brilliance over the last 15 years of his life. It is in Schenker's third volume Free Composition: Vol. III of New Musical Theories and Fantasies Part 2: Musical Examples (Freie Satz, 1935) that the idea of voice-leading receives its most detailed and precise formulation. Pendragon Press is honored to make this distinguished reprint of Schenker's musical examples available once again, with a new preface by Carl Schacter.

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.

The Cambridge Companion to Chopin provides the enquiring music-lover with helpful insights into a musical style which recognises no contradiction between the accessible and the sophisticated, the popular and the significant. Twelve essays by leading Chopin scholars make up three parts. Part 1 discusses the sources of Chopin's style in the music of his predecessors and the social history of the period. Part 2 profiles the mature music, and Part 3 considers the afterlife of the music - its reception, its criticism and its compositional influence in the works of subsequent composers.

Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire continues to be the go-to source for piano performers, teachers, and students. Newly updated and expanded with more than 250 new composers, this incomparable resource expertly guides readers to solo piano literature and provides answers to common questions: What did a given composer write? What interesting work have I never heard of? How difficult is it? What are its special musical features? How can I reach the publisher? New to the fourth edition are enhanced indexes identifying black composers, women composers, and compositions for piano with live or recorded electronics; a thorough listing of anthologies and collections organized by time period and nationality, now including collections from Africa and Slovakia; and expanded entries to account for new material, works, and resources that have become available since the third edition, including websites and electronic resources. The "newest Hinson" will be an indispensible guide for many years to come.

Sonata form is the most commonly encountered organizational plan in the works of the classical-music masters, from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to Schubert, Brahms, and beyond. Sonata Theory, an analytic approach developed by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in their award-winning Elements of Sonata Theory (2006), has emerged as one of the most influential frameworks for understanding this musical structure. What can this method from "the new Formenlehre" teach us about how these composers put together their most iconic pieces and to what expressive ends? In this new Sonata Theory Handbook, Hepokoski introduces readers step-by-step to the main ideas of this approach. At the heart of the book are close readings of eight individual movements from Mozart's Piano Sonata in B-flat, K. 333, to such structurally complex pieces as Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" String Quartet and the finale of Brahms's Symphony No 1 that show this analytical method in action. These illustrative analyses are supplemented with four updated discussions of the foundational concepts behind the theory, including dialogic form, expositional action zones, trajectories toward generically normative cadences, rotation theory, and the five sonata types. With its detailed examples and deep engagements with recent developments in form theory, schema theory, and cognitive research, this handbook updates and advances Sonata Theory and confirms its status as a key lens for analyzing sonata form.

This is a monograph on Western classical music written by a Chinese American. It contains the results of the author's years of work, i.e., more than two hundred thousand words of Beethoven-themed essays in the form of poems, essays, prose, and reviews. The book covers all aspects of the great composer Beethoven's life and career from his birth experience to his emotional life, from the background of the times to his ideology, from the review of his works to the analysis of music appreciation. The book is rich in historical information, rigorous in argumentation, incisive in commentary, and fluent in sentiment and reason. As a nonacademic scholar of Beethoven, this book is characterized by a distinctive personality, free from the constraints of traditional rules and regulations. Based on a comprehensive and profound understanding of the historical figure and his works, the author presents his original arguments and opinions on some important professional topics and fields.