Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony

Első borító
Indiana University Press, 2007. febr. 7. - 240 oldal

Classical music permeates contemporary life. Encountered in waiting rooms, movies, and hotel lobbies as much as in the concert hall, perennial orchestral favorites mingle with commercial jingles, video-game soundtracks, and the booming bass from a passing car to form the musical soundscape of our daily lives. In this provocative and ground-breaking study, Melanie Lowe explores why the public instrumental music of late-eighteenth-century Europe has remained accessible, entertaining, and distinctly pleasurable to a wide variety of listeners for over 200 years. By placing listeners at the center of interpretive activity, Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony offers an alternative to more traditional composer- and score-oriented approaches to meaning in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart.

Drawing from the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the politics of entertainment, and postmodern notions of pleasure, Lowe posits that the listener's pleasure stems from control over musical meaning. She then explores the widely varying meanings eighteenth-century listeners of different social classes may have constructed during their first and likely only hearing of a work. The methodologies she employs are as varied as her sources -- from musical analysis to the imaginings of three hypothetical listeners.

Lowe also explores similarities between the position of the classical symphony in its own time and its position in contemporary American consumer culture. By considering the meanings the mainstream and largely middle-class American public may construct alongside those heard by today's more elite listeners, she reveals the great polysemic potential of this music within our current cultural marketplace. She suggests that we embrace "crosstalk" between performances of this music and its myriad uses in film, television, and other mediated contexts to recover the pleasure of listening to this repertory. In so doing, we surprisingly regain something of the classical symphony's historical ways of meaning.

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Kiválasztott oldalak

Tartalomjegyzék

Introduction
1
1 On Meanings of Musical Meaning
8
2 The Immediacy of Structural Understanding
23
3 Enlightening the Listening Subject
70
4 Entertaining Pleasure
99
5 Pleasure and Meaning in Haydns Symphony in D Major No 93
133
Meanings of LateEighteenthCentury Public Instrumental Music in Contemporary American Culture
164
Notes
181
Bibliography
203
Index
215
Copyright

Más kiadások - Összes megtekintése

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
Melanie Diane Lowe
Töredékek - 2007

Gyakori szavak és kifejezések

absolute music aesthetic Agawu Allanbrook Allegro American argues audience B-flat Major bourgeois canon classical music comic composer construct context contrapuntal contredanse courtly critical cultural dance dance's echoes eighteenth century Enlightenment entertainment Example experience expressive meaning extra-musical fanfare Figaro film finale formal Frasier G Major gestures Haffner harmonic Hatten Haydn Haydn's Symphony hear heard hemiola historical imitation interpretive intertextual late eighteenth late-eighteenth-century listener's listening subject London melody minuet minuet movements Mozart Mozart Effect musical meaning noble notes opening opera orchestral overture passage pastoral philosophical phrase structure pleasure political popular Prague public concert public instrumental music quoted and trans rhythms second group second movement sense sentimental Sisman slow movement social solo sonata sound stability status strain Sturm und Drang style stylistic suggests Symphony in B-flat Symphony in D Symphony in G taste texture theater theme theory timpani tion tonal topics troping tune unison viewers Zaslaw

Népszerű szakaszok

103. oldal - I mean by the word Taste no more than that faculty or those faculties of the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.‎
1756 és 2008 között 137 könyvben jelenik meg
79. oldal - But we who deal in private character, who search into the most retired recesses, and draw forth examples of virtue and vice from holes and corners of the world, are in a more dangerous situation.‎
1749 és 2007 között 79 könyvben jelenik meg
100. oldal - In all these instances, this secondary pleasure of the imagination proceeds from that action of the mind which compares the ideas arising from the original objects with the ideas we receive from the statue, picture, description, or sound that represents them.‎
1726 és 2007 között 95 könyvben jelenik meg
20. oldal - Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.‎
1961 és 2007 között 122 könyvben jelenik meg
73. oldal - In a word, the aesthetic idea is a representation of the imagination, annexed to a given concept, with which, in the free employment of imagination, such a multiplicity of partial representations are bound up, that no expression indicating a definite concept can be found for it...‎
1952 és 2007 között 35 könyvben jelenik meg
75. oldal - Music, here, is not imitative, but if I may hazard the expression, merely suggestive. But, whatever we may call it, this I will venture to say, — that in the best instrumental Music, expressively performed, the very indecision itself of the expression, leaving the hearer to the free operation of his emotion upon his fancy, and, as it were, to the free choice of such ideas...‎
1812 és 2007 között 11 könyvben jelenik meg
74. oldal - ON THE DIFFERENT SENSES OF THE WORD, IMITATIVE, AS APPLIED TO MUSIC BY THE ANTIENTS, AND BY THE MODERNS. r I ^HE whole power of Music may be reduced, •*• I think, to three distinct effects ; — upon the ear, the passions, and the imagination: in other words, it may be considered as simply delighting the sense, as raising emotions, or, as raising ideas.‎
1812 és 2007 között 12 könyvben jelenik meg
101. oldal - It suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up (this is, in fact, the generalized definition of the 'grain' of writing) and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal's muzzle) to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous...‎
1977 és 2007 között 11 könyvben jelenik meg
23. oldal - Such a combination of excellence was contained in every movement, as inspired all the performers as well as the audience with enthusiastic ardour. Novelty of idea, agreeable caprice, and whim combined with all Haydn's sublime and wonted grandeur, gave additional consequence to the soul and feelings of every individual present.‎
1993 és 2007 között 8 könyvben jelenik meg
191. oldal - Many modern theories are unable to recognize that symbols are paradigmatically open to infinite meanings but syntagmatically, that is, textually open only to the indefinite, but by no means infinite, interpretations allowed by the context.‎
1972 és 2007 között 13 könyvben jelenik meg

A szerzőről (2007)

Melanie Lowe is Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University.

Bibliográfiai információk

CímPleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
Musical Meaning and Interpretation
SzerzőMelanie Lowe
KiadóIndiana University Press, 2007
ISBN0253000068, 9780253000064
Terjedelem240 oldal
  
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