Full Description
This volume of essays celebrates Hungarian musicologist László Somfai (b. 1934), head of the Budapest Bartók Archives for more than three decades, past president of the International Musicological Society, and a leading authority on the music of Joseph Haydn and Béla Bartók. His complex approach to source material involves evaluating biographical data while examining compositional sketches, notation, and performance practice, leading him to an "authentic" understanding of music that reaches beyond the discussion of musical sources.
This honorary volume is devoted to the topics and approaches he has pioneered, without limiting the discussion to any particular period or style of music history. With a natural emphasis on the Viennese classics and Bartók, the 34 essays in this volume cover a range of music study, from the Middle Ages through the second half of the 20th century. Contributions from younger scholars and leading musicologists alike have been collected, including Somfai's former students, friends, and colleagues from all over the globe. Complete with an up-to-date bibliography of Somfai's publications, this book presents new and in-depth analyses of source studies and performance practices of many great composers and musical styles.
Contents
Part 1 Preface by the Editors
Part 2 László Somfai: An Appraisal
Part 3 A Reverse Interview
Part 4 Part I: Theoretical Issues: Performance Practice, Editing, and Interpreting Music
Chapter 5 1. The Unbearable Lightness of Ethnomusicological Complete Editions: The Style of the ba'al tefillah (Prayer Leader) in the East European Jewish Service
Chapter 6 2. Ordinary Melodies in the Context of the "Old Romant Chant" Question
Chapter 7 3. In the Workshop of the musicus
Chapter 8 4. Performing Medieval Music in the Late-1960s: Michael Morrow and Thomas Binkley
Chapter 9 5. 19th-Century Paths to Palestrina's Music: Italian, German, and French Editions of the Missa Papae Marcelli
Chapter 10 6. Watermarks are Singles, Too: A Miscellany of Research Notes
Chapter 11 7. Toward a Performance History of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin: Preliminary Investigations
Chapter 12 8. "Returning to the Skin": On Theodor W. Adorno's Theory of Musical Interpretation
Part 13 Part II: Classical Style: From Gluck through Beethoven
Chapter 14 9. Siciliana-Tempi and Haydn's Sicilianos
Chapter 15 10. Haydn's Op. 9: A Critique of the Ideology of the "Classical" String Quartet
Chapter 16 11. The Voice of God in Haydn's Creation
Chapter 17 12. Gluck's Serenata Tetide (1760) and Mozart: A Supplement to the Preface to the First Edition in the Gluck-Gesamtausgabe
Chapter 18 13. Did Mozart "Pedal," and If So, How Much and Where?
Chapter 19 14. Mozart's Chamber Music with Keyboard: A Musical Panorama of Europe, 1762-1788
Chapter 20 15. Mozart's Mannheim Sonatas for Violin and Piano
Chapter 21 16. Mozart's Modular Minuet Machine
Chapter 22 17. Praise of Wine from Ofen, Ugliness, and Fiendship: Three Occasional Compositions by Franz Xavier Süßmayr
Chapter 23 18. Recycling Old Ideas in Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 132
Part 24 Part III: Nineteenth Century: Questions of a National Style
Chapter 25 19. A Suggestive Detail in Weber's Freischütz
Chapter 26 20. Franz Liszt's First Hungarian Symphonic Attempt: The National-ungarische Symphonie
Chapter 27 21. Umerenno or Andantino molto: On Musorgsky's Tempo Markings
Part 28 Part IV: Twentieth Century: Schoenberg, Bartók, Kodály, and Beyond
Chapter 29 22. Anxiety, Abstraction, and Schoenberg's Gestures of Fear
Chapter 30 23. Wagnerian Details in Webern's Op. 5, No. 2
Chapter 31 24. Zoltán Kodály's Art of Fugue: About the Neo-Classicism of the Concerto for Orchestra
Chapter 32 25. Bartók Analysis in America
Chapter 33 26. Bartók and His Song Texts
Chapter 34 27. The Making of a Cycle of Folksong Arrangements: The Sources of Bartók's Eight Hungarian Folksongs
Chapter 35 28. A Stray Leaf from Bartók's Black Pocket-Book
Chapter 36 29. Background of Bartók's "Bitonal" Bagatelle
Chapter 37 30. Analytical Notes to Bartók's Improvisations, Op. 20 and the Ordering of the Series
Chapter 38 31. Narrative Analysis in the Comparative Approach to Performances: The Adagio of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Chapter 39 32. Some Impressions on the Performance Tradition of the Bartók Violin Concerto
Chapter 40 33. "Hommage à Sacher via Bartók": Bartók Quotations in Henri Dutilleux's Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher and Heinz Holliger's Atembogen
Chapter 41 34. Luciano Berio's Sonata per pianoforte solo or The Disclosures of a Sketch Page
Part 42 A Somfai Bibliography
Part 43 Index of Proper Names
Part 44 About the Contributors
