Product Description

Beethoven's habit of composing by making many preliminary drafts and sketches was sufficiently unusual to attract attention even during his lifetime, and his creative process has attracted a good deal more attention since. This book incorporates the findings of recent studies on Beethoven's
creative process and examines his underlying creative motivation, the interrelationships between his various works, and how his output was determined by external factors and his personal life. Including an introduction to his compositional methods and a detailed study of particular compositional
problems of six different works, the book provides insight into the creative life of one of the greatest figures in musical history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #682965 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-07
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 346 pages

Review
`his new book impresses not only for the quality of some of its insights into the sketches themselves, but for the exceptional clarity of its writing which should open its findings to lay as well as professional readers' Bayan Northcott, The Independent

This study of Beethoven's creative procedures is one of the most original monographs on the composer to appear in recent years ... The book is clearly written, its messages are persuasively argued. It is nicely presented, with footnotes where they belong at the bottom of the page and a generous supply of clearly identified musical examples.' Musical Times

`His book is a work of scholarship, in language the layman can understand ... the best available introduction to Beethoven's composing methods.' Times Literary Supplement

'Cooper provides a very useful guide to the sketchbooks and their use, the visual appearance of the sketches, their typology and interrelationships, and the evidence they provide of Beethoven's approach to the sketching of form, key, melody and the vertical aspects of a composition. It is an arguing for a continuum between sketch and final version, for an understanding of the 'finality' of a published version as an arbitrary status perhaps conferred more by external pressures than by any inherent perfection, that Cooper's admirable book reaches its appropriately inconclusive and challenging end.' Nicholas Marston, Music and Letters

`Scholars have been studying Beethoven's unprecedented working methods for over a century now, but none has provided a more comprehensive and accessible account of the sketch material than Barry Cooper ... always writes clear and cogent prose.' Bayan Northcott, BBC Music

About the Author
Barry Cooper is at Manchester University.

Customer Reviews

Very provocative
An extremely well-written and inspiring work, Cooper succeeds in bringing us Beethoven the artist.