Even a symphony, with its highly specific orchestral score, changes through performance, so the sound of music in performance, and not just the score, should be the “text” of musicology. This paper describes a series of new analytical techniques which make use of simple tempo and duration measurements and a computer data base. Hundreds of performances of symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler and Tschaikovsky were studied. Sections are presented on historical trends in tempo (claims that the repertoire are slowing down or speeding up are false), tempo and duration (they are not exactly inversely related), duration and proportion, tempo tolerance (which is culturally and not mathematically determined), tempo fluctuation, tempo maps, performance of exposition structure, and flexibility. Both historical and methodological conclusions are presented.

Tempo, duration, and flexibility: Techniques in the analysis of performance

Schubert was subject to "the passions of an eagerly burning sensuality."' Four years later, in his obituary notice for Schubert, the poet Johann Mayrhofer discreetly sounded the same note: Schubert's character, he wrote, "was a mixture of tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candor, sociability and melancholy.'"2 There the matter rested until 185 7, when Alexandre Oulibicheff asserted, en passant, in his monograph on Beethoven, that Schubert had been "enslaved by passions mauvaises."'3 In that same year, the dramatist Eduard Bauernfeld explained to a would-be biographer that "Schubert had, so to speak, a double nature, the Viennese gaiety being interwoven and ennobled by a trait of deep melancholy. Inwardly a poet and outwardly a kind of hedonist."4 Perhaps to make the point less subtly, he elsewhere wrote of the "coarse and sensual [derb und sinnlich]" element in Schubert's character.5 19th-Century Music XII/3 (Spring 1989). ? by the Regents of the University of California.

Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini

. Among Beethoven9s works are a number that were highly successful in their own time but that became an embarrassment to later critics. In this article I explore the critical strategies used to explain away the success of two such works, Wellingtons Sieg and Der glorreiche Augenblick ——works marginalized by the ““Beethoven Hero”” paradigm that came to regulate critical interpretation of the composer9s music as well as underwriting the Beethovenian canon. I also explore ways in which such noncanonic works might be reexperienced, reading Wellingtons Sieg in terms of an aesthetic of hyper-representation and Der glorreiche Augenblick in terms of the enactment of community: such approaches, I argue, give access to aspects of Beethoven9s music that the ““Beethoven Hero”” paradigm suppressed.

The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813––14

Parallels between the mathematics of tiling, which describes geometries of visual space, and neo-Riemannian theory, which describes geometries of musical space, make it possible to show that certain paradoxes featured in the visual artworks of M. C. Escher also appear in the pitch space modelled by the neo-Riemannian Tonnetz. This article makes these paradoxes visually apparent by constructing an embodied model of triadic pitch space in accordance with principles drawn from the mathematics of tiling, on the one hand, and from cognitive science, on the other – specifically, the notion that our experience of pitch relationships is governed in part by the metaphorical projection of patterns abstracted from embodied experience known as image schemas. These paradoxes are illustrated with reference to passages drawn from four compositions to whose expressive character such paradoxes contribute: the fifteenth-century motet ‘Absalon fili mi’; the finale of Haydn's String Quartet in G major, Op. 76 No. 1; Brahms's Intermezzo in B minor, Op. 119 No. 1; and Wagner's Parsifal.

Paradoxes of Pitch Space

For several decades now an amusing debate has been going on among the writers of record jacket notes as to whether the second movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto does or does not involve some association with the Orpheus legend. This "debate" can be summarized in the following sentence, in which the wording is mine: "It was Liszt who first compared the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto with the story of Orpheus taming the wild beasts with the music of his lyre; Beethoven, of course, had no such idea in mind."

Constance S. Jolly

Papers

Beethoven As I Knew Him

Beethoven as I knew him : a biography