Notation in Johannes Brahms's sonata scores tells violinists and pianists far more than merely what pitches to play and how long to play them--if read carefully, these scores reveal an immense amount of expression, both of musical and human essences. Joel Lester's Brahms's Violin Sonatas magnifies key passages from these scores, revealing in clear and accessible language how the composer built his themes and musical narratives and how, ultimately, Brahms's music came to sound Brahmsian. Through close readings and annotated musical examples, Brahms's Violin Sonatas guides practitioners to read scores with care and to develop their own informed interpretation of the pieces, eschewing the notion of a single "correct" interpretation of the historical score. By exploring not only the sonatas' musical elements, but also their relationship to important events in the composer's life, Lester shows how subtle components can communicate the gestures, moods, personalities, and emotions that make Brahms's music so compelling. A companion volume to the author's award-winning 1999 study Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, and Performance (OUP), Brahms's Violin Sonatas is a clear and practical guide to understanding and performing Brahms's music in the present.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1899.

Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.

Takes up the problem of how Brahms fits into the culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna. This book examines the stylistic and a historical category of 'lateness' as it relates to the nineteenth century Viennese composer. It also looks at Brahms' place in narratives of lateness in both music and social history.

As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.

Half of these twelve original essays by international authorities are critical analyses of Brahm's music, while the remainder discuss influences, the reception of his music and his place in history.

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.

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 offers an in-depth analysis of musical variation through a systematic approach, heavily influenced by the principles of Grundgestalt and developed variations, both created by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). The author introduces a new transformational-derivative model and the theory that supports it, specifically crafted for the examination of tonal music. The idea for this book emerged during a sabbatical at Columbia University, while the content is the product of extensive research conducted at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, resulting in the development of the Model of Derivative Analysis. This model places emphasis on the connections between musical entities rather than viewing them as separate entities. As a case study, the Intermezzo in A Major Op.118/2 by Brahms is selected for analysis. The author's goal is to provide a formal and structured approach while maintaining the text's readability and appeal for both musicians and mathematicians in the field of music theory. The book concludes with the author's recommendations for further research.

Choral-Orchestral Repertoire: A Conductor’s Guide, Omnibus Edition offers an expansive compilation of choral-orchestral works from 1600 to the present. Synthesizing Jonathan D. Green’s earlier six volumes on this repertoire, this edition updates and adds to the over 750 oratorios, cantatas, choral symphonies, masses, secular works for large and small ensembles, and numerous settings of liturgical and biblical texts for a wide variety of vocal and instrumental combinations. Each entry includes a brief biographical sketch of the composer, approximate duration, text sources, performing forces, available editions, and locations of manuscript materials, as well as descriptive commentary, a discography, and a bibliography. Unique to this edition are practitioner’s evaluations of the performance issues presented in each score. These include the range, tessitura, and nature of each solo role and a determination of the difficulty of the choral and orchestral portions of each composition. There is also a description of the specific challenges, staffing, and rehearsal expectations related to the performance of each work. Choral-Orchestral Repertoire is an essential resource for conductors and students of conducting as they search for repertoire appropriate to their needs and the abilities of their ensembles.