Journal ArticleDOI
‘The Most Interesting Genre of Music’: Performance, Sociability and Meaning in the Classical String Quartet, 1800–1830
TLDR
In this article, the authors focus on a single measure in the slow movement of Beethoven's op. 59 no. 2 and argue that in various ways it raises and thus exemplifies the issues of the distribution of power, of musical initiative or the "genius of performance", and ultimately of differing subjectivities in the early nineteenth-century notion of the quartet.Abstract:
It has long been recognized that journalistic discourse about the string quartet in early nineteenth-century sources stressed its elevation and seriousness in comparison to other genres, and that the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were described as ‘classical’ very early in the century. Less well known is that the idea of performance is embedded in this discourse – particularly around the question of the group dynamics of ensemble performance. The tendency to blur the roles of the parts and the roles of the players are evidence of this, as is the discussion of the relation between first-violin-centricity and the ideal of free and equal contribution by all four parts/players in ‘true’ or ‘classical’ works. This ideal, I argue, is distinct from the longstanding metaphor of ‘conversation’ to describe the relations of the parts. The first part of this article explores these broad topics. The second part of the article focuses on a single measure in the slow movement of Beethoven's op. 59 no. 2 and argues that in various ways it raises and thus exemplifies the issues of the distribution of power, of musical initiative or the ‘genius of performance’, and ultimately of differing subjectivities in the early nineteenth-century notion of the quartet.read more
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Dissertation
(De)Constructing Paradigms of Genre:Aesthetics, Identity and Form in Franz Schubert’sFour-Hand Fantasias
TL;DR: The authors investigates and critiques the taxonomical criteria associated with Franz Schubert's piano music for four hands and investigates the role of medium, performer, audience, and form in the four-hand fantasias.
Journal ArticleDOI
Interesting Haydn: On Attention's Materials
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the idea of interest and the interesting in the late eighteenth century through Haydn's London experiences of the 1790s and argue that several of his London compositions, together with the surviving records of his English trips, bear the traces of a metropolitan mediascape and urban commercial environment in which attention and desire were newly conceivable in terms of the psychic investments of interest.
Journal ArticleDOI
Perceiving Irony in Music: The Problem in Beethoven’s String Quartets
TL;DR: The Quartett in F minor, Op. 95 as mentioned in this paper, is a piece of music written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.
Socio-Musical Performing Artistry
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify two distinct kinds of socio-musical artistry, and discuss some of the ways in which different forms of group organization articulate different possibilities for their exercise.
Journal ArticleDOI
The First Professional String Quartet? Reexamining an Account Attributed to Giuseppe Maria Cambini
TL;DR: This article examined an 1804 essay about string-quartet performance published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and attributed to the Italian-born and Paris-domiciled composer/violinist Giuseppe Maria Cambini.
References
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Book
Beethoven's string quartets
TL;DR: 1. Introductory 2. Opus 18 Numbers 3, 1, 2 and 4, and Conclusion.
Book
Haydn and the performance of rhetoric
Tom Beghin,Sander M. Goldberg +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process.