The Musical Thought And Spiritual Lives Of Heinrich Schenker And Arnold Schoenberg

This book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, Schenker and Schoenberg start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. The reception of Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s work has sidestepped this paradox of commonality and conflict, instead choosing to universalize and amplify their conflict. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s conflict is a reflection of tensions within their musical and spiritual ideas. They share a particular conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius. The tensions inherent in this largely psychological and material notion of the tone and this largely metaphysical notion of the genius shape both their musical divergence on the logical (technical) level in theory and composition, including their advocacy of the Ursatz versus twelvetone composition, and their spiritual convergence, including their embrace of Judaism. These findings shed new light on the musical and philosophical worlds of Schenker and Schoenberg and on the profound artistic and spiritual questions with which they grapple.

Music can answer questions that often confound more discursive modes of thought. Music takes concepts that are all too familiar, reframes these concepts, and returns them to us with incisive clarity and renewed vision. Unity is one of these "all too familiar concepts," thrown around by politicians, journalists, and pastors as if we all know what it means. By turning to music, especially musical space, the relational structure of unity becomes less abstract and more tangible within our philosophy. Arnold Schoenberg, as an inherently musical thinker, is our guide in this study of unity. His reworking of musical structure, dissonance, and metaphysics transformed the tonal language and aesthetic landscape of twentieth-century music. His philosophy of compositional unity helps us to deconstruct and reconceive how unity can be understood and worked with both aesthetically and theologically. This project also critiques Schoenberg's often monadic musical metaphysic by turning to Colin Gunton's conviction that the particularity and unity at the heart of God's triune being should guide all of our theological endeavors. Throughout, music accompanies our thinking, demonstrating not only how theology can benefit the philosophy of music but also how the philosophy of music can enrich and augment theological discourse.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is often portrayed as a composer who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the expressive character of those relatively early works which centre on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.

Kevin Korsyn is a renowned music theorist, musicologist, and pedagogue who has taught at the University of Michigan since 1992. He has published widely and influentially in areas as diverse as Beethoven and Brahms studies, chromatic tonality, disciplinarity and metatheory, history of theory, musical meaning and hermeneutics, poststructuralism (deconstruction, intertextuality, etc.), and Schenkerian theory and analysis. Because of the scope and caliber of his published work, and also his legacy as a pedagogue, Korsyn has had a profound impact on the field of music theory, along with the related fields of historical musicology and aesthetics. This book, a festschrift for Korsyn, comprises essays that constellate around his numerous scholarly foci. Represented in the volume are not only familiar music-theoretical topics such as chromaticism, form, Schenker, and text-music relations, but also various interdisciplinary topics such as deconstruction, disability studies, German Idealism, posthumanism, and psychoanalysis. The book thus reflects the increasingly multifaceted intellectual landscape of contemporary music theory.

The contemporary music scene thus embodies a uniquely broad spectrum of activity, which has grown and changed down to the present hour. With new talents emerging and different technologies developing as we move further into the 21st century, no one can predict what paths music will take next. All we can be certain of is that the inspiration and originality that make music live will continue to bring awe, delight, fascination, and beauty to the people who listen to it. This book cover modernist and postmodern concert music worldwide from the years 1888 to 2018. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on the most important composers, musicians, methods, styles, and media in modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide, from 1888 to 2018. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about modern and contemporary classical music.

In this volume, the first panoramic study of music in the apocalyptic mode, an international and trans-disciplinary array of scholars and composers explore the resonance of the ancient biblical Revelation of John across the centuries in musical works as diverse as El Cant de la Sibil·la, the Dies Irae, cantatas and oratorios by Bach and Telemann, Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, African American Spirituals, Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Christian “ApokRock,” Hip-hop, Grimes’s album Miss Anthropocene, and the songs of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. This innovative volume will engage scholars, students, and all those interested in the intersection of music, religion, history, and popular culture.

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

This encyclopaedic book proposes a sweeping reformulation of the basic concepts of Western music theory, revealing simple structures underlying a wide range of practices from the Renaissance to contemporary pop. Its core innovation is a collection of simple geometrical models describing the implicit knowledge governing a broad range of music-making, much as the theory of grammar describes principles that tacitly guide our speaking and writing. Each of its central chapters re-examines a basic music-theoretical concept such as voice leading, repetition, nonharmonic tones, the origins of tonal harmony, the grammar of tonal harmony, modulation, and melody. These are flanked by two largely analytical chapters on rock harmony and Beethoven. Wide-ranging in scope, and with almost 700 musical examples from the Middle Ages to the present day, Tonality: An Owner's Manual weaves philosophy, mathematics, statistics, and computational analysis into a new and truly twenty-first century theory of music.