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4 books match the query 'Chamber Music'

cover of Chamber Music

Chamber Music

Giuseppe Verdi

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Once Verdi had become Italy’s preeminent opera composer, he created only a few compositions for instrumental soloists, most notably the String Quartet in E Minor. He originally wanted to keep the string quartet—which was first performed in his hotel for a few friends—private, but eventually he allowed its publication and it soon became well known all over Europe and the United States. Though several recordings are available and the piece is regularly featured in performances, all of them use later editions that do not live up to Verdi’s intentions as recorded in his autograph score. This critical edition is based on that score, preserved at the Naples conservatory library, and the composer’s own instructions for performance.

Verdi wrote as gifts for admirers the three original piano pieces—“Romance sans paroles,” “Valzer,” and “Album Leaf for Francesco Florimo”—also included here, and these critical editions are based on the autograph scores or, in the case of “Romance sans paroles,” on photographs of the never-released original.  Editor Gundula Kreuzer details the origins, sources, and performance questions of all these works in her skillful introduction, and her critical commentary explains editorial problems and solutions.

The instrumental parts are also available as Quartetto (1873): Four Parts for String Quartet (ISBN 978-0-226-85321-5), extracted from this full score.
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cover of Chamber Music: An Essential History

Chamber Music

An Essential History

Mark A. Radice

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Intended for the music student, the professional musician, and the music lover, Chamber Music: An Essential History covers repertoire from the Renaissance to the present, crossing genres to include string quartets, piano trios, clarinet quintets, and other groupings. Mark A. Radice gives a thorough overview and history of this long-established and beloved genre, typically performed by groups of a size to fit into spaces such as homes or churches and tending originally toward the string and wind instruments rather than percussion. Radice begins with chamber music's earliest expressions in the seventeenth century, discusses its most common elements in terms of instruments and compositional style, and then investigates how those elements play out across several centuries of composers- among them Mozart, Bach, Haydn, and Brahms- and national interpretations of chamber music. While Chamber Music: An Essential History is intended largely as a textbook, it will also find an audience as a companion volume for musicologists and fans of classical music, who may be interested in the background to a familiar and important genre.
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cover of Image and Structure in Chamber Music

Image and Structure in Chamber Music

Donald N. Ferguson

University of Minnesota Press, 1964

Image and Structure in Chamber Music was first published in 1964. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The major portion of this book is devoted to descriptions of the most important chamber music works, taken up in separate chapters by composer in broadly chronological order—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. There are also chapters on the intimacy of chamber music, on the antecedents of the above-named composers, on nationalistic chamber music, on twentieth-century chamber music, and on chamber music in the United States.

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cover of The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities

The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music

Composers, Consumers, Communities

Marie Sumner Lott

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Music played an important role in the social life of nineteenth-century Europe, and music in the home provided a convenient way to entertain and communicate among friends and colleagues. String chamber music, in particular, fostered social interactions that helped build communities within communities.

Marie Sumner Lott examines the music available to musical consumers in the nineteenth century, and what that music tells us about their tastes, priorities, and activities. Her social history of chamber music performance places the works of canonic composers such as Schubert, Brahms, and Dvoøák in relation to lesser-known but influential peers. The book explores the dynamic relationships among the active agents involved in the creation of Romantic music and shows how each influenced the others' choices in a rich, collaborative environment. In addition to documenting the ways companies acquired and marketed sheet music, Sumner Lott reveals how the publication and performance of chamber music differed from that of ephemeral piano and song genres or more monumental orchestral and operatic works. Several distinct niche markets existed within the audience for chamber music, and composers created new musical works for their use and enjoyment.

Insightful and groundbreaking, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music revises prevailing views of middle-class influence on nineteenth-century musical style and presents new methods for interpreting the meanings of musical works for musicians both past and present.

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