Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #463586 in Books
• Published on: 1985-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Customer Reviews

Classic Music by Leonard Ratner
The book was in good condition and I got it for an excellent price.

Ren Merry

Expression and Musical Precepts of 18th Century Classic Music
From Preface:

"The music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and their contemporaries has a familiar and friendly ring. It speaks to us clearly and directly. We are moved by the power of eloquence of its masterpieces, and we delight in the trimness and fluency of its minor works.

Much has been written about this music and its makers. Library shelves are crowded with histories, biographies, surveys, bibliography and gesture studies. Yet something eludes us among this extensive literature; that is, a full-scale explication of the stylistic premises of classic music, a guide to the principles according to which this music was composed.

This book undertakes to define these principles. It offers a set of criteria, drawn from musical analysis and theoretical treatises of the 18th century, that can serve as guidelines for the investigation of classic music.

The music central to this study, circa 1770-1800, is vast in quantity. The 'Breitkopf Thematic Catalogue, 1762-1787', lists thematic incipits of close to 10,000 compositions; thousands of 18th-century composers are listed in the RISM catalogue.

The problems of recovery, authentication, and editing this enormous repertory are overwhelming. But its very size becomes and advantage for style analysis. Since most of this music had to be composed quickly, for immediate use, composers relied on familiar and universally accepted formulas for its organization and handling of detail. Wherever we sample this music, we find it runs true to type.

This consistency bespeaks a 'language' understood throughout Europe and parts of the New World. Moreover, to speak of the 18th-century music as a language is not simply to use a figure of speech. Structural parallels between music and oratory follow a clear path through music theory of the 17th and 18th centuries. Just as there were rules for organizing an oratorical discourse, so were there explicit prescriptions for building a musical progression. Both language and music and their vocabulary, syntax, and arrangement of formal structures, subsumed under the title 'Rhetoric.' The skilled composer, the well-trained performer, the perceptive listener had command of musical rhetoric, much as a literate person today deal with the grammar of language. The expertise of the composer was shown in his ability to manipulate his ideas flexibly and felicitously within the rhetorical system.

...

This book allows the student to approach the music and musical precepts of the 18th century in much the same way a listener of that time would have done. The first attraction to the music would be to its melodic materials, the topics of the musical discourse, its vocabulary. They are examined in detail in Part I, 'Expression.'
Each of the following sections probes deeper into the core of the music: its syntax is examined in Part II, 'Rhetoric'; its formal structure in Part III, 'Form'; and its overall style in Part IV, 'Stylistic Perspectives.' The rhetorical principles discussed here have been used by the author in his teaching of music literature and theory at Stanford University. The volume is addressed to students, performers, and listeners, whose appreciation of the scope of classic music can be increased by insights into how it was put together."

Excellent
Thorough, laid out clearly, covers all the points needed to understand the forms. Highly recommended.