Listen Again: A New History of Music

Description

How do you tell the key of a piece—without looking at a score? How do you know when a musical work ended before an audience applauds or a radio announcer returns on air? Was there, in fact, a ‘breakdown of tonality’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? These questions and others are the focus of David Wulstan’s Listen Again: A New History of Music. He also shows where the nuove musiche of the early Baroque era came from and what the two critical but unlinked chords in the middle of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. III signify. Previous literature in music does not properly address these questions and innumerable others. In Listen Again, Wulstan illustrates how music from Bach to Bartók was far less "revolutionary" than customarily imagined and that the "inversionist" doctrine of Rameau and kindred acoustical misconceptions, courtesy of Heinrich Schenker and other analysts, solve fewer problems than their purveyor claim. In Listen Again, Wulstan takes to task early theorists, who were mostly clerics who ignored non-ecclesiastical music, and their modern equivalents, who consider only the blinding white of the written or printed score, whilst ignoring music as heard and interpreted by the ear and brain. Instead, Wulstan enquires into the musical activities of the common folk to addressing key issues that early and modern theorists have regularly overlooked. The book will appeal anyone who has dismissed "harmony," "theory" and the like as alien, in effect, to practical music. Readers will find in Listen Again that the true history of music has far more practical relevance for performers than the aridity of music theory coursework, demonstrating by example how this work a book about music, not, as in the case of so much theoretical work, a "book about books." Listen Again Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Glossary Permissions Chapter 1 Some Matters of Terminology and Other Preliminaries Chapter 2 The Recognition of Key Chapter 3 Tonal Balance and Minor Tonality: The Use of Sequences; Dissonance Chapter 4 The Rule of the Octave: Harmony and Rhythm Chapter 5 The Enhanced Tonic: Fugal Technique and Tonality Chapter 6 Complex Key Chapter 7 The Classical Style (1) Chapter 8 The Classical Style (2) Chapter 9 Classical to Romantic: Beethoven and Schubert Chapter 10 The Romantic Era (1): Chopin, Brahms and Mendelssohn Chapter 11 The Romantic Era (2): The Age of Wagner Chapter 12 The Perception of Music Chapter 13 The Twentieth Century (1): The Palette of Debussy Chapter 14 The Twentieth Century (2): Themes and Theories in the Music of Stravinsky and Others Chapter 15 The Twentieth Century (3): Techniques and Treatises—Bartók, Hindemith, and others Chapter 16 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Chapter 17 Two Cultures Chapter 18 Mediæval to Renaissance Chapter 19 Renaissance to Baroque Chapter 20 Back to the Future References Index About the Author