Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni

Ford, Charles; Allanbrook, Wye Jamison

doi:10.2307/854345

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Modern authors revisit the concept of "topic"-drawn from the classical rhetoric's "topos"-turning it into a cornerstone of a new, poststructuralist approach to musical semiotics and hermeneutics (e.g., Ratner, 1980;Agawu, 1991;Tarasti, 1994;Mirka, 2014). An important elaboration is the integration of the concept of musical gesture into theories concerned with musical meaning (e.g., Allanbrook, 1983;Hatten, 2004). Topics and gestures are construed as intersections between musical structure and semantics; sustained through cultural conventions, they are by definition publicly accessible, allowing for identification and signification among the members of a cultural community.…”

Section: Dynamic-rhetoric Opening Gestures In Work For Orchestra/larg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process?

Chawin

2023

EMR

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Theories of tonal music take for granted that all keys of the same mode (i.e., all major and all minor keys) are employed by composers in essentially the same way; however, newer analytical and cognitive research challenges this view by pointing to aspects of transpositional nonequivalence among the keys. The present study offers possibly the first systematic, data-driven investigation of correlations between the choice of absolute key and structure across a composer's body of works. By performing an extensive corpus-based analysis of music by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91), we derive 55 prototypes, subsuming phenomena from three independent domains: dynamic-rhetoric gestures that launch orchestral works, digressions to the parallel minor in sonata-allegro movements, and the occurrences of a particular six-note motive across Mozart's complete oeuvre. Ten prototypes display a significant association with a specific key after correction for multiple comparisons, amounting to a statistically significant total. Investigation of key-related musical structure offers fresh insight into Mozart's compositional decisions and the relation between schemata and their instantiations in his works, at the same time suggesting a revised perspective on traditional key characteristics. Mozart's perfect pitch offers one possible explanation for the role of key-related structure in his works; however, we also contemplate other possible explanations.

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Section: Dynamic-rhetoric Opening Gestures In Work For Orchestra/larg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process?

Chawin

2023

EMR

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The Musical Topic in the Twentieth Century: A Case Study of Schoenberg’s Ironic Waltzes

Frymoyer¹

2017

Music Theory Spectrum

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Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity

Freitas¹

2018

Journal of the American Musicological Society

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By any measure, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) must be considered the leading singer, if not the leading musician, of the later nineteenth century. Her sizable body of recordings (twenty-eight) makes her a key witness to late nineteenth-century performance style. Her great celebrity also ensured lavish written documentation of her life, including what she did, what people said about her, and sometimes what she said about herself. In this article I bring together these two types of material to consider a central aspect of Patti's life and artistry: her relationship to contemporary notions of femininity. Like all women who entertained before the public, Patti contended with the taint of immorality. I argue that her response to that taint shaped both her overall conduct and her particular vocalism. For while in truth her way of life fundamentally contradicted the reigning ideals of womanhood, Patti projected in her dress, her makeup, her public statements, her published imagery, and, most importantly, her stage characterizations and vocal styling the most perfect manifestation of femininity available: the virginal ingénue. The consistency of this self-performance encourages the identification of a similar persona in her singing, and indeed through close readings of several recordings I expose what I call her “maidenly mode,” a vocal strategy analogous to her other ingenuous representations. If many, like Verdi, found in Patti a “perfect equilibrium between singer and actress,” her example can begin to suggest to us what it meant to sound like an ingénue in late nineteenth-century Europe.

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Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process?

Key-Specific Structure in Mozart's Music: A Peek into his Creative Process?

The Musical Topic in the Twentieth Century: A Case Study of Schoenberg’s Ironic Waltzes

Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity

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