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  3. Music in Context

The aim of Music in Context is to illuminate specific musical works, repertoires or practices in historical, critical, socio-economic or other contexts; or to illuminate particular cultural and critical contexts in which music operates through the study of specific musical works, repertoires or practices. A specific musical focus is essential, while avoiding the decontextualisation of traditional aesthetics and music analysis. The series title invites engagement with both its main terms; the aim is to challenge notions of what contexts are appropriate or necessary in studies of music, and to extend the conceptual framework of musicology into other disciplines or into new theoretical directions.

  • General Editors: Benedict Taylor, University of Edinburgh
  • Founding Editors: Julian Rushton, University of Leeds Emeritus
  • Editor Emerituss: J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Royal Holloway, University of London Emeritus

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19 results in Music in Context

  • Monteverdi and the Marvellous
  • Poetry, Sound, and Representation
  • Roseen Giles
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: November 2023
  • Print publication: 30 November 2023
  • View description
    The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music relations that addresses scholars of both literature and music. It illuminates how experiments in language and perception at the turn of the seventeenth century were influenced and informed by the work of musicians of that era. Giles provides a new perspective on the music and poetry of Monteverdi's madrigals through the poetics of the marvellous. In his madrigals, Monteverdi created a reciprocity between poetry and music which encouraged audiences to contemplate their interactions, and, consequently, to listen differently.
Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark
  • Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark
  • The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music
  • Annika Forkert
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: October 2023
  • Print publication: 31 October 2023
  • View description
    The composer Elisabeth Lutyens and her second husband, the conductor and music programmer Edward Clark, were innovators in composition, conducting, programming, teaching, and music administration in Britain between 1918 and 1983. Controversial in their professional and personal views and tastes, their achievements obscured by layers of anecdote and some self-inflicted reputational harm, this book critically re-assesses their roles as cornerstones of structures and developments in British music that we now take for granted. Key to understanding their central roles in orchestrating musical progress is the ambiguous role of influence in their work and the intimate connections between British and European music. This study critically charts their professional lives in music, taking a holistic approach to contextualise Lutyens and Clark's multifaceted work in music historically, music-analytically, and culturally.
Schubert's String Quartets
  • Schubert's String Quartets
  • The Teleology of Lyric Form
  • Anne Hyland
  • Published online: 13 April 2023
  • Print publication: 20 April 2023
  • View description
    Franz Schubert's music has long been celebrated for its lyrical melodies, 'heavenly length' and daring harmonic language. In this new study of Schubert's complete string quartets, Anne Hyland challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. Her exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert's development of a lyrically conceived teleology, bringing musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement. Her formal analyses grant special focus to the quartets of 1810–16, isolating the questions they pose for existing music theory and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology thereby opening up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them.
The Songs of Clara Schumann
  • The Songs of Clara Schumann
  • Stephen Rodgers
  • Published online: 30 March 2023
  • Print publication: 06 April 2023
  • View description
    Focusing on Clara Schumann's central contributions to the genre of the Lied (or German art song), this is the first book-length critical study of her songs. Although relatively few in number, they were published and reviewed favorably in the press during her lifetime, and they continue to be programmed regularly in recitals by professional and amateur performers alike. Highlighting the powerful and distinctive features of the songs, the book treats them as a prism, casting light not just on them but also through them to explore questions that foster a deeper understanding of the work of female composers. The author argues for the importance of taking Clara Schumann's music on its own terms, the intimate relationship between text and musical form, and the vital role of musical analysis in recuperating the contributions of previously understudied composers.
Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination
  • Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination
  • Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933
  • Emily MacGregor
  • Published online: 28 January 2023
  • Print publication: 26 January 2023
  • View description
    The symphony has long been entangled with ideas of self and value. Though standard historical accounts suggest that composers' interest in the symphony was almost extinguished in the early 1930s, this book makes plain the genre's continued cultural dominance, and argues that the symphony can illuminate issues around space/geography, race, and postcolonialism in Germany, France, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on a number of symphonies composed or premiered in 1933, this book recreates some of the cultural and political landscapes of an uncertain historical moment-a year when Hitler took power in Germany, and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination asks what North American and European symphonies from the early 1930s can tell us about how people imagined selfhood during a period of international insecurity and political upheaval, of expansionist and colonial fantasies, scientised racism, and emergent fascism.
Music behind the Iron Curtain
  • Music behind the Iron Curtain
  • Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries
  • Daniel Elphick
  • Published online: 09 October 2019
  • Print publication: 03 October 2019
  • View description
    Mieczysław Weinberg left his family behind and fled his native Poland in September 1939. He reached the Soviet Union, where he become one of the most celebrated composers. He counted Shostakovich among his close friends and produced a prolific output of works. Yet he remained mindful of the nation that he had left. This book examines how Weinberg's works written in Soviet Russia compare with those of his Polish contemporaries; how one composer split from his national tradition and how he created a style that embraced the music of a new homeland, while those composers in his native land surged ahead in a more experimental vein. The points of contact between them are enlightening for both sides. This study provides an overview of Weinberg's music through his string quartets, analysing them alongside Polish composers. Composers featured include Bacewicz, Meyer, Lutosławski, Panufnik, Penderecki, Górecki, and a younger generation, including Szymański and Knapik.
Composing Community in Late Medieval Music
  • Composing Community in Late Medieval Music
  • Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice
  • Jane D. Hatter
  • Published online: 02 May 2019
  • Print publication: 02 May 2019
  • View description
    When we sing lines in which a fifteenth-century musician uses ethereal polyphony to complain mundanely about money or hoarseness, more than half a millennium melts away. Equally intriguing are moments in which we experience solmization puns. These familiar worries and surprising jests break down temporal distances, humanizing the lives and endeavors of our musical forebears. Yet many instances of self-reference occur within otherwise serious pieces. Are these simply in-jokes, or are there more meaningful messages we risk neglecting if we dismiss them as comic relief? Music historian Jane D. Hatter takes seriously the pervasiveness of these features. Divided into two sections, this study considers pieces with self-referential features in the texts separately from discussions of pieces based on musical self-referential elements. Examining connections between self-referential repertoire from the years 1450–1530 and similar self-referential creations for painters' guilds, reveals musicians' agency in forming the first communities of early modern composers.
The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603)
  • The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603)
  • Owen Rees
  • Published online: 13 March 2019
  • Print publication: 28 March 2019
  • View description
    Victoria's Requiem is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. Owen Rees's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. Victoria composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of María of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events - and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies - to be reconstructed vividly. Rees then locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.
Brahms's Elegies
  • Brahms's Elegies
  • The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture
  • Nicole Grimes
  • Published online: 12 February 2019
  • Print publication: 24 January 2019
  • View description
    Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesänge reveals the philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the late-eighteenth-century texts by Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness, and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.
Delius and the Sound of Place
  • Delius and the Sound of Place
  • Daniel M. Grimley
  • Published online: 10 November 2018
  • Print publication: 06 December 2018
  • View description
    Few composers have responded as powerfully to place as Frederick Delius (1862–1934). Born in Yorkshire, Delius resided in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia before settling in France, where he spent the majority of his professional career. This book examines the role of place in selected works, including 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', Appalachia, and The Song of the High Hills, reading place as a creative and historically mediated category in his music. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary art, and literature, and more recent writing in cultural geography and the philosophy of place, this is a new interpretation of Delius' work, and he emerges as one of the most original and compelling voices in early twentieth-century music. As the popularity of his music grows, this book challenges the idea of Delius as a large-scale rhapsodic composer, and reveals a richer and more productive relationship between place and music.
Polyphony in Medieval Paris
  • Polyphony in Medieval Paris
  • The Art of Composing with Plainchant
  • Catherine A. Bradley
  • Published online: 27 July 2018
  • Print publication: 09 August 2018
  • View description
    Polyphony associated with the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame marks a historical turning point in medieval music. Yet a lack of analytical or theoretical systems has discouraged close study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century musical objects, despite the fact that such creations represent the beginnings of musical composition as we know it. Is musical analysis possible for such medieval repertoires? Catherine A. Bradley demonstrates that it is, presenting new methodologies to illuminate processes of musical and poetic creation, from monophonic plainchant and vernacular French songs, to polyphonic organa, clausulae, and motets in both Latin and French. This book engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring concepts of authorship and originality as well as practices of quotation and musical reworking.
Olivier Messiaen's <I>Catalogue d'oiseaux</I>
  • Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux
  • From Conception to Performance
  • Roderick Chadwick, Peter Hill
  • Published online: 05 December 2017
  • Print publication: 21 December 2017
  • View description
    Roderick Chadwick and Peter Hill give a detailed account of the evolution of Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux for piano solo, from its initial conception in the Black Forest in 1953 to its completion and premiere in the Parisian 'Concerts du Domaine Musical' at the end of the decade. Through close examination of the composer's birdsong cahiers they demonstrate how Messiaen translated nature into music in a way that had a major impact on his later work. They also consider issues of performance, and Messiaen's artistic relationship with his dedicatee and wife-to-be, Yvonne Loriod, including the significance of her two recordings of the cycle. This book illuminates the Catalogue from a variety of angles: its historical significance, as a study of how mimicry of nature can be transformed into music of mesmeric originality, and as a guide that offers a wealth of fresh insights to listeners and performers.
The Operas of Maurice Ravel
  • The Operas of Maurice Ravel
  • Emily Kilpatrick
  • Published online: 05 November 2015
  • Print publication: 26 October 2015
  • View description
    Maurice Ravel's operas L'Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1919–25) are pivotal works in the composer's relatively small œuvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the heart of Ravel's compositional aesthetic. In this comprehensive study, Emily Kilpatrick unites musical, literary, biographical and cultural perspectives to shed new light on Ravel's operas. In documenting the operas' history, setting them within the cultural canvas of their creation and pursuing diverse strands of analytical and thematic exploration, Kilpatrick reveals crucial aspects of the composer's working life: his approach to creative collaboration, his responsiveness to cultural, aesthetic and musical debate, and the centrality of language and literature in his compositional practice. The first study of its kind, this book is an invaluable resource for students, specialists, opera-goers and devotees of French music.
Manuscripts and Medieval Song
  • Manuscripts and Medieval Song
  • Inscription, Performance, Context
  • Edited by Helen Deeming, Elizabeth Eva Leach
  • Published online: 05 June 2015
  • Print publication: 28 May 2015
  • View description
    The manuscript sources of medieval song rarely fit the description of 'songbook' easily. Instead, they are very often mixed compilations that place songs alongside other diverse contents, and the songs themselves may be inscribed as texts alone or as verbal and musical notation. This book looks afresh at these manuscripts through ten case studies, representing key sources in Latin, French, German, and English from across Europe during the Middle Ages. Each chapter is authored by a leading expert and treats a case study in detail, including a listing of the manuscript's overall contents, a summary of its treatment in scholarship, and up-to-date bibliographical references. Drawing on recent scholarly methodologies, the contributors uncover what these books and the songs within them meant to their medieval audience and reveal a wealth of new information about the original contexts of songs both in performance and as committed to parchment.
The Monstrous New Art
  • The Monstrous New Art
  • Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet
  • Anna Zayaruznaya
  • Published online: 05 April 2015
  • Print publication: 02 April 2015
  • View description
    Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.
<I>Frauenliebe und Leben</I>
  • Frauenliebe und Leben
  • Chamisso's Poems and Schumann's Songs
  • Rufus Hallmark
  • Published online: 05 December 2014
  • Print publication: 04 December 2014
  • View description
    Rufus Hallmark's book explores Robert Schumann's beloved yet controversial song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben and the poems of Adelbert von Chamisso on which it is based, setting them in the context of the challenges and social expectations faced by women in early nineteenth-century Germany. Hallmark provides the most extensive English-language study of Chamisso, a poet little known today outside Germany, including a biographical sketch and excerpts from his other poetry. He examines a range of poems about women, by Chamisso and others, and discusses the reception of the poetic and musical cycles, including illustrated editions, contemporary reviews, and other musical settings. Based on new studies of Schumann's manuscript sources and on comparative analyses of his songs and settings by Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, Franz Lachner and others, Hallmark provides fresh musical and interpretive insights into each song.
Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets
  • Beethoven's Theatrical Quartets
  • Opp. 59, 74 and 95
  • Nancy November
  • Published online: 05 December 2013
  • Print publication: 09 January 2014
  • View description
    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.
The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism
  • The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism
  • Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton
  • J. P. E. Harper-Scott
  • Published online: 05 September 2012
  • Print publication: 16 August 2012
  • View description
    Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, which embraces all the music of Western modernity. This systematic definition of musical modernism introduces readers to theory by Badiou, Žižek and Agamben. Basing his analyses on the music of William Walton, Harper-Scott explores connections between the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and responses to the event of modernism in order to challenge accepted narratives of music history in the twentieth century.
Mozart's Requiem
  • Mozart's Requiem
  • Reception, Work, Completion
  • Simon P. Keefe
  • Published online: 05 July 2012
  • Print publication: 28 June 2012
  • View description
    Presenting a fresh interpretation of Mozart's Requiem, Simon P. Keefe redresses a longstanding scholarly imbalance whereby narrow consideration of the text of this famously incomplete work has taken precedence over consideration of context in the widest sense. Keefe details the reception of the Requiem legend in general writings, fiction, theatre and film, as well as discussing criticism, scholarship and performance. Evaluation of Mozart's work on the Requiem turns attention to the autograph score, the document in which myths and musical realities collide. Franz Xaver Süssmayr's completion (1791–2) is also re-appraised and the ideological underpinnings of modern completions assessed. Overall, the book affirms that Mozart's Requiem, fascinating for interacting musical, biographical, circumstantial and psychological reasons, cannot be fully appreciated by studying only Mozart's activities. Broad-ranging hermeneutic approaches to the work, moreover, supersede traditionally limited discursive confines.