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The String Quartet, 1750-1797: Four Types of Musical Conversation.

Article Excerpt
By Mara Parker. Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. [xiii, 315 p. ISBN 1-84014-682-6. $74.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

In The String Quartet, 1750-1797, Mara Parker develops a new means by which to examine and assess the vast repertoire of string quartets composed from the middle of the eighteenth century up to but not including the works of Beethoven. Her sample data, an impressively extensive collection of over 650 works by numerous composers of various nationalities, leads her to suggest that four kinds of musical discourse characterize the movement types in these quartets: the lecture, the polite conversation, the debate, and the conversation. She discusses each of these discourse types in tour principal chapters. These follow three initial chapters on the works' function as chamber music, their social position in select eighteenth-century European cities, and past scholarship on the genre.

Parker's goal in presenting dais typology, beyond simply categorizing these works, appears to be a two-fold critique of the string quartet scholarship that she surveys. First, she seeks with her four-fold discursive model to provide an alternative to what she terms a "structural" or alternatively "theoretical" approach to the genre, one that focuses on motivic working in sonata form movements. Then, she claims that using her new typology one...

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