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Subject Area: Music-Criticism
Greene, David B.2010 0-7734-4665-6 200 pages
This book takes up pieces of music that imagine community. These works do not illustrate concepts of community or make community an explicit theme. Nevertheless, the particular techniques and structure of each work project an imagining of community that is unique to the piece. Studying the pieces together lays the groundwork for re-imagining the relation of arts and society.
Swain, Joseph P.
2023 1-4955-1155-3 324 pages
[This] is a work of traditional music criticism. It asks why these two German composers, born less than one month and 125 kilometers apart--cultural twins--could compose so differently from each other as well as their colleagues and yet both achieve universal acclaim as the greatest exponents of the Baroque. Finding even partial answers to this question naturally deepens readers' knowledge and appreciation of their art, and thereby amplifies the experience of listening to it. I wrote the book especially for those who love the music of Bach and Handel of course, but because their work underlies in so many ways all the music that came after them." -Joseph P. Swain (Preface) This book was originally published by Pendragon Press in 2018.
Tuttle, Marshall
2016 1-4955-0516-2 260 pages
This work examines a specific technical and expressive means by which the various ecclesiastical modes persisted and were integrated into compositional practices of the tonal period, from the time of Bach through to the early twentieth century. It is demonstrated that a technique of integrating modes into tonal music is not through the use of melodic or harmonic materials, but through modulation. Modulations can be drawn from and limited to those keys which derive from chords that exist in the modal scale of the final key of a composition. This leads to what can only be referred to as a kind of pseudo-diatonic chromaticism. Modulations are limited by a diatonic scale, but that scale is distinct from the major-minor scale system which characterizes the surface level musical activity of a composition. Hence the modulations are chromatic according to a given key, but individual keys visited are limited by a very traditional set of diatonic relationships among themselves.