Combines fresh approaches to the life and music of the beloved nineteenth-century composer with the latest and most significant ways of thinking about rhythm, meter, and musical time.

First published in 2011. Johannes Brahms: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer. The second edition will include research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources.

"This book reflects the increasing significance of musical performance studies in recent decades. Originally published as separate essays over thirty years, the twelve chapters have been refashioned as a monograph which is both scholarly in nature and intensely personal, building on the author's extensive musical experience, most notably as a pianist. Hence the primary focus on piano music by Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms and Rachmaninoff. The book's cross-cutting themes nevertheless apply to diverse performance idioms and domains. By exploring themes in complementary ways, the book offers broad insights into musical ontology, epistemology and semantics while demonstrating various methodologies now used to study performance. Among other things, it highlights the powerful effects that experiencing music in performance can have on those who take part in it, in any capacity. There are many practical insights too. The volume has four sections, focusing on 'performance and performance studies', historical performance, analysis and performance, and artistic research. Case studies of romantic masterpieces for the piano feature throughout"--

This book is intended to help those who are contemplating performing or studying the Brahms Requiem. It provides historical information, performance considerations, musical analysis, and resource material for all who enjoy the musicology behind this magnificent work. It is especially directed toward conductors, but it is also useful for choristers and soloists as well. A wonderful instructional tool!

Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms's scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Professor Ryan McClelland provides an in-depth study of these movements that also contributes significantly to an understanding of Brahms's compositional language and his creative dialogue with musical traditions. McClelland especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms's music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In Brahms's scherzo-type movements, McClelland traces transformations of primary thematic material, demonstrating how the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative that provides structural coherence and generates expressive meaning. McClelland's interpretations of the expressive implications of Brahms's fascinatingly intricate musical structures frequently engage issues directly relevant to performance. This illuminating book will appeal to music theorists, musicologists working on nineteenth-century instrumental music and performers.

A great deal of evidence survives about how Brahms and his contemporaries performed his music. But much of this evidence - found in letters, autograph scores, treatises, publications, recordings, and more - has been hard to access, both for musicians and for scholars. This book brings the most important evidence together into one volume. It also includes discussions by leading Brahms scholars of the many issues raised by the evidence. The period spanned by the life of Brahms and the following generation saw a crucial transition in performance style. As a result, modern performance practices differ significantly from those of Brahms's time. By exploring the musical styles and habits of Brahms's era, this book will help musicians and scholars understand Brahms's music better and bring fresh ideas to present-day performance. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by the accompanying CD of historic recordings - including a performance by Brahms himself.

An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

A publication of the American Brahms Society, Brahms Studies publishes essays on the life, work, and artistic milieu of Johannes Brahms. Each volume collects the best in Brahms scholarship, including criticism, analysis, theory, biography, archival and documentary studies, and translations of important studies that have appeared in foreign languages.

Originally published in 1936, as a second edition in 1948 and as an enlarged and third edition in 1982, Karl Geiringer’s biography of Brahms is generally regarded as one of the finest studies of the composer ever published in any language. It is based on the body of material in the archives of the Viennese Society of Friends, for which Karl Geiringer was curator from 1930-1938, and which contains more than a thousand letters written by and to Brahms. These letters, exchanged with family and with his famous contemporaries, reveal his loneliness, grim humour, loyalty, painful shyness and enthusiasm for the music of Beethoven and Schubert – moods that the self-effacing composer did not like to publicly display. Divided into sections on Brahms’s solitary, scholarly existence and his fruitful composing career – including examinations of rare first drafts – the biography relates how crises in Brahm’s personal life were translated into his music, and how he often managed to ignore or suppress them.

Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.