Brahms's Song Collections: Rethinking a Genre.

Brahms Songs;Song Cycle;Bakhtin Speech Genres;Musical Unity;Text Music Relations;Schumann;Music and Dance;Arts;Music: Theory

Stevens, Daniel BrianSatyendra, Ramon ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Brahms Songs;    Song Cycle;    Bakhtin Speech Genres;    Musical Unity;    Text Music Relations;    Schumann;    Music and Dance;    Arts;    Music: Theory;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/60668/dbsteven_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

By theorizing the role of genre in Johannes Brahms’s song collections, this dissertation explores what the composer’s alluring description of these pieces as ;;Liedersträuβe” (;;song bouquets”) might imply for their analysis and interpretation as music-textual wholes.Where other approaches to Brahms’s song collections have explored their historical formation, this study examines their theoretical implications and analytical challenges.Opp. 57, 85, and 70 are analyzed to demonstrate the variety of interconnecting textual and musical aspects found in Brahms’s collections.In each case, apparent unities are resisted by other elements of music and text, thereby suggesting an ironic concept of Brahms’s song bouquet and calling into question any stable generic identity of them as wholes.Brahms’s creative approach to the nineteenth-century song collection thus invites a renewed interest in musical genre.This dissertation studies concepts of genre developed in a variety of disciplines in order to articulate new modes of relating text and music in Brahms’s collections, not just within songs but also between them.Rather than propose a static model or rigid taxonomy that would be applicable to any particular song collection, I examine the underlying conceptual frameworks that enable us to take a variety of interpretive positions.This dissertation takes as its theoretical starting point different notions of what it means to be a composer, listener, or musical work and then develops a model of the constructive interaction between these roles.I later extend this model to provide a new terminology for discussing the relationship between words and music in Brahms’s bouquets.To explore alternative approaches to the issue of unity, I use the four figurative tropes to suggest how alternative constructions of particular bouquets reflect an underlying coordination of part and whole.Finally, Brahms’s ideas regarding the organization of cadences within individual songs are extended to suggest how multiple songs can achieve large-scale closure.By embracing the ambiguities and multiple identities offered by Brahms’s bouquets, this dissertation arrives at a notion of genre that allows us to account for their plurality of potential meanings and to rethink what it means to be a listener of these enigmatic works.