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Overview"Unfinished Music draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin that serves as its epigraph: ""the work is the death mask of its conception."" The work in its finished, perfected state conceals the enlivening process engaged in its creation. An opening chapter of this book examines some explosive ideas from the mind of J. G. Hamann, eccentric figure of the anti-rationalist Enlightenment, on the place of language at the seat of thought. These ideas are pursued as an entry into the no less radical mind of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose bold idiosyncrasies, like Hamann's, disrupted the discourse of Enlightenment aesthetics. Bach is a central player here, his late music the subject of fresh inquiry. In several chapters on the late music of Beethoven, Bach reappears, now something of a spiritual alter ego in the search for a new voice. The improvisatory as a mode of thought figures prominently here, and then inspires a new hearing of the envisioning of Chaos at the outset of Haydn's Creation, aligned with Herder's efforts to come to an understanding of logos at the origin of thought. The improvisatory is at the heart of a chapter on Beethoven's brazen cadenzas for the Concerto in D minor by Mozart, another ghost in Beethoven's machine. Music seductively unfinished is the topic of other chapters: on some unstudied late sketches, finally rejected, for a famous quartet movement by Beethoven; on the enigmas set loose in several remarkable Mozart fragments; and on the romanticizing of fragment and its bearing on two important sonatas that Schubert left incomplete. In a final coming to terms with the imponderables of musical intuition, the author returns to Benjamin's epigraph, drawing together his foundational essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and with a draft for a famous passage in the andantino of Schubert's Sonata in A (1828). Unfinished Music explores with subtle insight the uneasy relationship between the finished work and the elusive, provocative traces of the profound labors buried in its past. The book will have broad appeal to the community of music scholars, theorists and performers, and to all those for whom music is integral to the history of ideas." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Richard Kramer (Distinguished Professor of Music, Graduate Center, Distinguished Professor of Music, Graduate Center, City University of New York)Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Dimensions: Width: 23.60cm , Height: 3.10cm , Length: 16.30cm Weight: 0.887kg ISBN: 9780195326826ISBN 10: 0195326822 Pages: 424 Publication Date: 17 April 2008 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsPreface I: First Things 1: Language and the Beginnings of Creation Preamble A Rhetoric of Sonata Sketches and the Improvisatoyr Fragments/Patrimonies II: Emanuel Bach and the Allure of the Irrational 2: Carl Philip Emanuel Bach and the Aesthetics of Patricide 3: The Ends of Veranderung 4: Late Works Kenner and Liebhaber A Last Sonata 5: Probestuck 6: Diderot's Paradoxe and Emanuel Bach's Empfindungen III: Between Enlightenment and Romance 7: Haydn's Chaos and Herder's Logos 8: Beethoven and the Romance of Creation Beethoven's Sketches and Shakespeare's Lovers Sketching the Improvisatory The Limits of Improvisation IV: Beethoven: Confronting the Past 9: Cadenza contra Text 10: Opus 90: In Search of Emanuel Bach 11: Adagio espressivo: Opus 109 as Radical Dialectic 12: Lisch aus, mein Licht: Song, Fugue and the Symptoms of A Late Style V:Fragments 13: Toward an Epistemology of Fragment 14: Reliquiel VI: Death Masks 15: Walter Benjamin and the Apprehending of BeautyReviewsThis extraordinary book provides a unitary experience, revealing a deep and special perspective on classical music and style. It should be required reading for anyone studying or interested in 18th-century music. --CHOICE<br> Richard Kramer's Unfinished Music is a work of great daring and vast erudition, rich in profundities, and overflowing with striking insights into the deepest levels of musical significance. The range of topics is astonishing--fantasia, cadenza, variation; sketches, fragments, improvisations; narrativity, beauty, late style. Music willingly yields its most closely-held secrets to Kramer's sensitive ear and probing mind. --Maynard Solomon, author of Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination<br> Richard Kramer's profound meditations on music from 1770 to 1828 are wonderful reading for all music-lovers who care about Beethoven and Schubert, and indispensable for an understanding of the vital importance of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach for Mozart and Beethoven. --Charles Rosen, author of Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen<br> Unfinished Music creates and sustains a distinctive critical discourse. In his quest to recognize the elusive moment of artistic intuition, to be knowingly alive to what cannot be known, Richard Kramer reanimates a profound impulse from the twilight of the Enlightenment. The result is a beautifully heard performance that engages every piece of evidence--philosophical, literary, musical--with the same combination of imaginative address and exacting grasp. --Scott Burnham, Professor of Music, Princeton University<br> Author InformationRichard Kramer is the author of Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song, awarded the Kinkeldey prize of the American Musicological Society and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor prize, and of many essays on the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Beethoven and Schubert. Kramer, who teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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