This is our backup site. Click here to visit our main site at MellenPress.com

Bruhn, Siglind

Siglind Bruhn is a musicologist, concert pianist, and interdisciplinary scholar. An independent researcher in music analysis/mucisology, she is presently affiliated with the University of Michigan as a Research Associate in Music and Humanities.

Arnold Schoenberg's Journey from Tone Poems to Kaleidoscopic Sound Colors
2023 1-4955-1076-X
"Scholars and audiences continue to debate whether the development of European music unfolded in parallel to that in the other arts, literature and the fine arts in particular. ...The five principle chapters of this book follow the major developmental steps through which Schoenberg passes in the course of the years 1899-1914. The introductory pages of each chapter illuminate the relevant aesthetic aim in the context of a few typical paintings and literary works created at the same time, with the aim of highlighting significant correspondences. The glances at cross-disciplinary parallels arise from a twofold intention. They lead lovers of literature and the fine arts to the recognition that the stylistic innovations with which they are familiar from paintings and poems, sculptures and Prose, architecture and drama created in the years preceding World War I have their counterparts in music. ....[They indicate that] Schoenberg's development in this phase of his creative life to be unique." -Siglind Bruhn (Preface) This book was originally published in 2015 by Pendragon Press.

Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen
2023 1-4955-1108-1
"This study undertakes to show that some music can be understood as portraying and nuancing, commenting on and interpreting a non-musical stimulus, and to elaborate in detail just how this is achieved in a number of small musical works. The result reveals that there is a wealth of possible relationships between musical components and the extra-musical stimuli that presumably brought them into being." Siglind Bruhn (Preface) This book was originally published in 1997 by Pendragon Press.

Messiaen's Contemplations of Covenant and Incarnation: Musical Symbols of Faith in the Two Great Piano Cycles of the 1940s
2023 1-4955-1181-2
"Olivier Messiaen, master of sounds, was gifted with an unusual visual sense. While his physical eyes always needed thick glasses, his inner eye saw much that remains hidden to most. Music and Color is the title of the only volume of conversations published under the composer's own name rather than under that of the respective interviewer, thus drawing the readers' attention to the importance Messiaen attached to one of the basic aspects of visual perception. ...Were one to move in the direction of inner perception, one would arrive at the dimension of contemplations and visions. This book aims to direct its readers' interest specifically toward the metaphysical, theological, and sometimes mystical visions manifested in the two piano cycles whose movements are compiled under the titles of 'visions' and 'contemplations' respectively." -Siglind Bruhn (Preface)

The Temptation of Paul Hindemith: Mathis der Maler as a Spiritual Testimony
2023 1-4955-1168-5
"In the 1930s, Paul Hindemith, then Germany's foremost composer, found himself torn between three forces. The Nazi government demanded that he write music glorifying the Third Reich...friends and colleagues urged that he use his influence and speak up against the immorality of German politics, while his own deepest wish was to live exclusively for his art--to compose, perform and teach. In the midst of this dilemma, which eventually led to his emigration, Hindemith composed his opera Mathis der Maler." -Siglind Bruhn [Introduction] This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 1998.

Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representations of Religious Experience
2023 1-4955-1167-7
This edited volume focuses on various aspects of the connections between the sacred, religion, or spirituality and music. "Up to the Middle Ages, music employed for ritual expressions of faith in sacred contexts and for evocations ...was contrasted with music presented for entertainment." -Siglind Bruhn [Introduction] This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2002.