Sounding Values

Selected Essays.

For several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half of the volume confronts pressing issues of historical theory and aesthetics, including intellectual models of tonal theory, leading concepts of sonata form, translations of music into poetic meaning, and recent rifts and rapprochements between criticism and analysis. The essays in the second half can be read as a series of critical appreciations, engaging some of the most consequential reception tropes of the past two centuries: Haydn and humor, Mozart and beauty, Beethoven and the sublime, Schubert and memory.

CONTENIDO:

Introduction

Part I Theories and Practices
Romantic Aesthetics
1. Review Essay: E.T.A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings
2. Criticism, faith and the idée: A.B. Marx's early reception of Beethoven

Interpreting Historical Theory
3. Musical and intellectual values: interpreting the history of tonal theory
4. Method and motivation in Hugo Riemann's history of harmonic theory
5. A.B. Marx and the gendering of sonata form
6. Models of musical analysis: form.

The State of Play: Approaches to Criticism and Analysis
7. The criticism of analysis and the analysis of criticism
8. Theorists and 'the music itself'
9. How music matters: poetic content revisited

Part II Impact and Effect: Critical Takes on Canonic Composers
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
10. The second nature of the sonata form
11. Haydn and humor
12. Mozart's felix culpa: Così fan tutte and the irony of beauty
13. On the beautiful in Mozart
14. Our sublime Ninth
15. The 4 ages of Beethoven: critical reception and the canonic composer.

Schubert, Schumann
16. Schubert and the sound of memory
17. Landscape as music, landscape as truth: Schubert and the burden of repetition
18. Novel symphonies, dramatic overtures

Index