Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is the single most important document in the history of the construct known as absolute music, the idea that music functions as an entirely self-contained and self-referential art. Hanslick deleted—and did not replace—the final paragraph of the first edition, cutting most of it for the second edition of 1858 and the remainder for the third edition of 1865. This original ending evokes imagery that stands out from most of the rest of the treatise, including references to the “great motions of the cosmos” and “profound and secret connections to nature.” Scholars have pointed to the apparent inconsistencies of both tone and substance in this paragraph over and against the rest of the treatise to explain its later deletion but have not suggested why Hanslick might have ended his treatise in this way originally. The evocation of “connections to nature” points to the influence of Naturphilosophie, a mode of thought particularly prevalent in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century that posited a basic unity of all nature. Proponents of Naturphilosophie, including such major figures as Schelling, Ritter, Goethe, and Ørsted, believed that the basic forces of nature were all interconnected. Ernst Chladni's demonstrations of the geometric patterns that could be created by sound under certain conditions fascinated his contemporaries and provide an example of how motion, sound, form, and beauty might all be interrelated. Hanslick saw tönend bewegte Formen (“forms set in motion through tones”) as the essence of music, and his original ending suggests that the kind of motion resulting in sound was related to the motions at work in physics, light, magnetism, and other forces, the “great motions of the cosmos.”</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Robert Schumann's Blumenstück, op. 19, a short piano piece dating from 1839, is generally not included among the composer's more poetically inspired or formally adventurous pieces. Thanks in part to Schumann's own disparaging remarks about the piece, Blumenstück, like the stylistically similar Arabeske, op. 18, has been viewed as a fairly straightforward effort to appeal to amateur consumers—especially women consumers—of domestic piano music. Rather than recuperate Schumann's piece through a revelation of its structural achievements, this article links the piece's mixed aesthetic status to the similar standing of flowers (and the genre of flower painting to which Schumann's title alludes) in early-nineteenth-century German culture. Emblematic of women and the expression of conventional sentiments, flowers nonetheless constituted a remarkably evocative symbol in Romantic literature. Sentimental and Romantic discourses of the flower converged in the trope of Blumensprache (the language of flowers), an idea that found expression in both popular manuals cataloguing the meanings of flowers and the more esoteric environments of Schumann's criticism, E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales, and Heinrich Heine's poetry. In each of these venues, flowers served as imaginary conduits joining mundane and transcendent realms. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Kittler, I argue that Schumann's Blumenstück, with its conflicting imperatives of pleasure and instruction, congenial melody and motivic intertwining, conflates aesthetic and reception-based categories in a related manner and, as a result, undermines traditional means of generic classification.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Hairpins, the notation symbols &amp;lt; and &amp;gt;, are today universally accepted as equivalent to the markings crescendo and diminuendo, calling for an increase or decrease in volume. This view is irreconcilable with the scores of the core German repertoire of the nineteenth century. This article offers a new understanding of hairpins based on careful examination of the scores of Brahms and of early-twentieth-century recordings by artists close to him. In Brahms's milieu hairpins did not prescribe sounds, but rather described meanings. The difference between prescription and description is central, suggesting that instead of “growing louder/quieter,” hairpins are better understood as “becoming more/less.” The means by which “more/less” was realized by nineteenth-century musicians included many techniques beyond dynamics, most notably agogic inflection.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>“You must have had the experience of burying someone dear to you,” wrote Gustav Mahler in a letter explaining his Second Symphony to the music critic Max Marschalk, suggesting that the critic's own experiences with death might help him better understand the symphony. Inversely, if listeners bring personal losses to bear on the piece, Mahler's Second Symphony offers one possible model for coping with death. If we take the distinction that Sigmund Freud draws between two responses to loss—melancholia and mourning—as a discursive frame, Mahler's Second Symphony may be heard as an attempt to come to terms with the death of a loved one by moving gradually from melancholia to mourning. According to Freud, a melancholic subject cannot truly cope with the traumatic experience and instead reenacts it, but someone who mourns truly remembers the loss and thus commemorates the dead, allowing them to live on, if only in memory.</jats:p> <jats:p>Framed in such a way, the early movements of Mahler's Second Symphony—characterized by the alternation between halting sections that dissolve almost as soon as they begin and long-breathed melodies that seem to unfold effortlessly—suggest the melancholic subject's struggle between despair in the face of abject meaninglessness and a manic euphoria, neither of which addresses the loss. By contrast, the text in the symphony's final movement, adapted by Mahler from Friedrich Klopstock's chorale on the resurrection of the dead, encourages true remembrance of the deceased as a figure beyond death. Heard as a musical enactment of mourning, the final movement suggests that the dead who are mourned are resurrected through remembrance. Forcing us to acknowledge Mahler's death on some level, the final movement completes the work of mourning by engendering the composer's own resurrection in our memories as we witness each performance of his Second Symphony.</jats:p>