The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of the string quartet, often represented as a smooth and logical progression from first violin-dominated homophony to a more equal conversation between the four voices. Yet this progression was neither as smooth nor as linear as previously thought, as Mara Parker illustrates in her examination of the string quartet during this period. Looking at a wide variety of string quartets by composers such as Pleyel, Distler and Filtz, in addition to Haydn and Mozart, the book proposes a new way of describing the relationships between the four instruments in different works. Broadly speaking, these relationships follow one of four patterns: the 'lecture', the 'polite conversation', the 'debate', and the 'conversation'. In focusing on these musical discourses, it becomes apparent that each work is the product of its composer's stylistic choices, location, intended performers and intended audience. Instead of evolving in a strict and universal sequence, the string quartet in the latter half of the eighteenth century was a complex genre with composers mixing and matching musical discourses as circumstances and their own creative impulses required.

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of the string quartet, often represented as a smooth and logical progression from first violin-dominated homophony to a more equal conversation between the four voices. Yet this progression was neither as smooth nor as linear as previously thought, as Mara Parker illustrates in her examination of the string quartet during this period. Looking at a wide variety of string quartets by composers such as Pleyel, Distler and Filtz, in addition to Haydn and Mozart, the book proposes a new way of describing the relationships between the four instruments in different works. Broadly speaking, these relationships follow one of four patterns: the 'lecture', the 'polite conversation', the 'debate', and the 'conversation'. In focusing on these musical discourses, it becomes apparent that each work is the product of its composer's stylistic choices, location, intended performers and intended audience. Instead of evolving in a strict and universal sequence, the string quartet in the latter half of the eighteenth century was a complex genre with composers mixing and matching musical discourses as circumstances and their own creative impulses required.

This Companion offers a concise and authoritative survey of the string quartet by eleven chamber music specialists. Its fifteen carefully structured chapters provide coverage of a stimulating range of perspectives previously unavailable in one volume. It focuses on four main areas: the social and musical background to the quartet's development; the most celebrated ensembles; string quartet playing, including aspects of contemporary and historical performing practice; and the mainstream repertory, including significant 'mixed ensemble' compositions involving string quartet. Various musical and pictorial illustrations and informative appendixes, including a chronology of the most significant works, complete this indispensable guide. Written for all string quartet enthusiasts, this Companion will enrich readers' understanding of the history of the genre, the context and significance of quartets as cultural phenomena, and the musical, technical and interpretative problems of chamber music performance. It will also enhance their experience of listening to quartets in performance and on recordings.

Assessing Haydn's quartets, this work explores the circumstances of their creation. It reveals the conventions and novelties that govern their design and examines the wealth of textures stylistic allusions, and rhetorical strategies that underlie their stature as a cornerstone of the chamber music repertory.

This research guide is an annotated bibliography of sources dealing with the string quartet. This second edition is organized as in the original publication (chapters for general references, histories, individual composers, aspects of performance, facsimiles and critical editions, and miscellaneous topics) and has been updated to cover research since publication of the first edition. Listings in the previous volume have been updated to reflect the burgeoning interest in this genre (social aspects, newly issued critical editions, doctoral dissertations). It also offers commentary on online links, databases, and references.

In 1829 Goethe famously described the string quartet as 'a conversation among four intelligent people'. Inspired by this metaphor, Edward Klorman's study draws on a wide variety of documentary and iconographic sources to explore Mozart's chamber works as 'the music of friends'. Illuminating the meanings and historical foundations of comparisons between chamber music and social interplay, Klorman infuses the analysis of sonata form and phrase rhythm with a performer's sensibility. He develops a new analytical method called multiple agency that interprets the various players within an ensemble as participants in stylized social intercourse - characters capable of surprising, seducing, outwitting, and even deceiving one another musically. This book is accompanied by online resources that include original recordings performed by the author and other musicians, as well as video analyses that invite the reader to experience the interplay in time, as if from within the ensemble.

This collection of articles dedicated to the memory of Lenore Coral divides into three sections that focus on her scholarly interests: music of the eighteenth century, music libraries and collections, and new approaches to the musical canon. Many of the seventeen contributions included in the volume are the result of the individual author's connection with Lenore, or were projects that she had been directly involved with, either as dissertation advisor, committee member, or interested observer. The senior scholars and music librarians represented here are testament to the impact of her intellect and influence.

Beethoven's middle-period quartets, Opp. 59, 74 and 95, are pieces that engage deeply with the aesthetic ideas of their time. In the first full contextual study of these works, Nancy November celebrates their uniqueness, exploring their reception history and early performance. In detailed analyses, she explores ways in which the quartets have both reflected and shaped the very idea of chamber music and offers a new historical understanding of the works' physical, visual, social and ideological aspects. In the process, November provides a fresh critique of three key paradigms in current Beethoven studies: the focus on his late period; the emphasis on 'heroic' style in discussions of the middle period; and the idea of string quartets as 'pure', 'autonomous' artworks, cut off from social moorings. Importantly, this study shows that the quartets encompass a new lyric and theatrical impetus, which is an essential part of their unique, explorative character.

Chamber Music: A Research and Information Guide is a reference tool for anyone interested in chamber music. It is not a history or an encyclopedia but a guide to where to find answers to questions about chamber music. The third edition adds nearly 600 new entries to cover new research since publication of the previous edition in 2002. Most of the literature is books, articles in journals and magazines, dissertations and theses, and essays or chapters in Festschriften, treatises, and biographies. In addition to the core literature obscure citations are also included when they are the only studies in a particular field. In addition to being printed, this volume is also for the first time available online. The online environment allows for information to be updated as new research is introduced. This database of information is a "live" resource, fully searchable, and with active links. Users will have unlimited access, annual revisions will be made and a limited number of pages can be downloaded for printing.

European Romanticism gave rise to a powerful discourse equating genres to constrictive rules and forms that great art should transcend; and yet without the categories and intertextual references we hold in our minds, "music" would be meaningless noise. Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology teases out that paradox, charting the workings and legacies of Romantic artistic values such as originality and anti-commercialism in relation to musical genre. Genre's persistent power was amplified by music's inevitably practical social, spatial, and institutional frames. Furthermore, starting in the nineteenth century, all music, even the most anti-commercial, was stamped by its relationship to the marketplace, entrenching associations between genres and target publics (whether based on ideas of nation, gender, class, or more subtle aspects of identity). These newly strengthened correlations made genre, if anything, more potent rather than less, despite Romantic claims. In case studies from across nineteenth-century Europe engaging with canonical music by Bizet, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, and Brahms, alongside representative genres such as opéra-comique and the piano ballade, Matthew Gelbart explores the processes through which composers, performers, critics, and listeners gave sounds, and themselves, a sense of belonging. He examines genre vocabulary and discourse, the force of generic titles, how avant-garde music is absorbed through and into familiar categories, and how interpretation can be bolstered or undercut by genre agreements. Even in a modern world where transcription and sound recording can take any music into an infinite array of new spatial and social situations, we are still locked in the Romantics' ambivalent tussle with genre.