Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric.

Article Excerpt
Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric. Edited by Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. [xx. 366 p. ISBN-13: 9780226041292. $45.] DVD, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.

Musical analysis of any sort is valuable insofar as it leads the listener (in the broadest sense) to fresh experiences of a given work or repertoire. The same analysis increases in value as it broadens the cultural vision of the perceiver, leading to deeper listening and deeper understanding. On all of these counts, and more, the volume of essays at hand scores high marks.

The book reproduces eleven of fifteen presentations given at the conference, " 'A Clever Orator': Colloquies and Performances Exploring Rhetoric in Haydn's Chamber Music" at the University of California, Los Angeles in April 2001. The apparent goal of the published symposium was to give a discussion of musical rhetoric its full due: to place it in an historical (Haydn's past, present, and future) and cultural context by going beyond a musicological perspective on the subject to include scholars from parallel disciplines. The present volume reunites four contributors to the earlier Haydn and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): Tom Beghin, Mark Evan Bonds, Elaine Sisman, and James Webster. Additional musicologists in this collection include C. P. E. Bach scholar Annette Richards and Haydn veteran Laszlo Somfai. The contributions of classicist. Sander Goldberg, historian James Van Horn Melton, and the two literary/cultural scholars Timothy Erwin and Marshall Brown establish a substantial basis for the image of Haydn as orator. The first essays ("Backgrounds") approach questions of performance, rhetoric, and aesthetics contextually, while the later essays ("Foregrounds") view the context through the perspective of the music and its performance.

Included with the book is a...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!