Musical Topics and Musical Performance

<p>The principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by later receivers, albeit in a different context and with a need for historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980) introduced the idea of topics, his relatively simple ideas have been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors. Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of musicology, often embracing semiotics, but its relationship to performance has received less attention. <i>Musical Topics and Musical Performance</i> thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice, and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as well as how performers have responded to such a presence in practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from composers as diverse as Beethoven, Scriabin and Péter Eötvös. Using both scores and recordings, the book presents a variety of original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of distinguished authors, and addresses a neglected area of musicology and musical performance.</p> <p>Introduction</p><p>Julian Hellaby</p><p>Chapter One</p><p>Topics and Music Performance: Some Reflections and a Proposal for a Theory</p><p>Eero Tarasti</p><p>Chapter Two</p><p>"Rhetorical" Versus "Organicist" Performances: A Pragmatic Approach</p><p>Joan Grimalt</p><p>Chapter Three</p><p>‘es brennt mein Eingeweide’: Agitato in Settings of Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt</p><p>William Dougherty</p><p>Chapter Four</p><p>Expanding the Parameters of Historically-Informed Performance: Topics in Nineteenth-Century Miniatures for Stringed Instruments</p><p>George Kennaway</p><p>Chapter Five</p><p>Piano Schools, Topics and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor </p><p>Daniela Tsekova-Zapponi</p><p>Chapter Six</p><p>Narrative Analysis, the Sonata Cycle and Implications for Performance: A Reading of Brahms’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp Minor</p><p>Janice Dickensheets</p><p>Chapter Seven</p><p>From Performer to Conjuror: Topical Performance in the Piano Works of Scriabin</p><p>Darren Leaper and Cecilia Xi</p><p>Chapter Eight</p><p>The Topic of the <i>Gato</i> in the Early Works of Alberto Ginastera and the Disambiguation of <i>Pequeña Danza</i></p><p>Melanie Plesch</p><p>Chapter Nine</p><p>TopICS and Performance in PÉter Eötvös’s Violin Concerto <i>Seven</i> (2007)</p><p>Márta Grabócz</p><p>Chapter Ten</p><p>Romantic Performance and Gestural Topic</p><p>Lina Navickaitė-Martinelli</p>