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Warsaw's salons, especially those principally dedicated to musical gatherings, provided the most interesting venue for serious music making. This chapter discusses the professional and amateur musicians who were active in the salon scene, repertories favored within the salon settings — piano, vocal, and chamber music in particular — and the specifics of music-making in musical salons, especially those at the homes of Joseph Christoph Kessler and Józef and Anna Cichocki. For Chopin, much musical education came in the guise of salon chamber concerts, which included chamber transcriptions of orchestral music. Performances of this sort gave him the opportunity to become acquainted with repertories not heard in concert (by listening to or participating in performances). They also provided him with a venue through which he could test and customize his own compositions.

Acknowledging both the general aging of music that Adorno heard in Brahms and observations that most of his oeuvre sounds “twilit”, this chapter asserts “late style” as nonetheless meaningful. Rejecting cause and effect, it draws on Freud's concept of overdetermination to address the emergence of late-style features and proposes an addendum to late-style dialectics: late works are at once an expression of their time and alienated from the contemporary context. The significance of German nationalism to works from the mid-1880s and others from the 1890s is explored, as is the politicization of “late style”. Rather than simplifying late style, the chapter uses diverse manifestations — e.g., mannerism, blending of technical and expressive features — as hermeneutic points of entry. Special emphasis is placed on Brahms's mastery of ways and degrees of asserting a key in tonality's late period, and on moments of expressive complexity that model psychological process, evoking Freud's Vienna.

By the late 19th century, the adagio had become a genre marked by the technical attributes and lofty connotations of “unending melody”. Because of Beethoven's achievements, composers found adagios difficult to write. This chapter asserts that the treatment of transitions was crucial for the effect required by genre aesthetics of the adagio. In the 1860s, Brahms used short constructive units but lengthy transitions based on picturesque figuration to foster the illusion of continuous melody. Although critics in the 1880s considered recent adagios to fall short of Beethoven's standards, they saw renewal in Bruckner's String Quintet. Possibly in response to Bruckner's success, Brahms composed an adagio for cello and piano, avoiding closure through his mastery of degrees of tonal stability. In his most acclaimed adagios, however, he extended transitional passages by using Gypsy style's extemporized sound and other signifiers of “raw emotion”, creating a semblance of renewed expressive and formal freedom.

This chapter places Chopin within Warsaw's lively concert scene. The concert life in Warsaw was dominated by virtuoso concerts, featuring local and foreign artists, Niccolò Paganini and Johann Nepomuk Hummel among them. The conventions and repertories associated with the virtuoso concerts, piano concertos in particular, as well as Chopin's earliest public concerts are discussed in detail. At the same time, music societies provided opportunities for performances on symphonic and chamber repertories that included the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. There were ambitious performances of sacred music in Warsaw churches, especially the Piarists' Church which hosted the Society for Church Music, and the Lutheran Church, which during the 1820s attracted Warsaw's best musicians, including the young Chopin. Musical performances also took place in many cafés. In some cafés, artistic projects were discussed and artistic events received the most candid reviews; others fostered an atmosphere of intense patriotism.

The influence of folk song on chamber music is difficult to divide from that of folk song on music in general. Chamber music is to be distinguished from other music chiefly in its scope and technique; an influence such as that of the folk song is likely to be felt by a composer equally whether he is writing symphonies, operas, or quartets. Therefore, to trace the influence of folk song on chamber music must, of necessity, be a rather arbitrary proceeding, consisting merely of tracing the folk influences on a composer's style generally and concentrating attention on those of his works that happen to fall under the head of chamber music. There is, however, one class of such music which is particularly likely to be influenced by folk song; namely, all that which is of melodic pattern and on a small and simple scale, written for a solo instrument or for two or three instruments in combination.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of a chamber movement by Brahms, which introduces the book's themes, one of which concerns genre aesthetics and in particular cultural significance assigned to chamber music and slow movements. Focusing on the inwardness expressed in the excerpt, it then elucidates a second theme, the historicity of his music: the passage, with its clearly implied reflecting subject, sounds of its time and place, late 19th-century Vienna. Further discussion of the excerpt exposes other themes: of lateness within Brahms's oeuvre and in music-historical narratives that encompass him and his time. The chapter establishes the book's historical perspectives and critical sources, such as ideas about late Liberalism taken from Adorno and Lukács. It also introduces the eclectic analytical methodology and music-analytic questions to be addressed, which concern late style and historical lateness.

An exploration of all the major critical issues associated with considering Joyce as a poet, this essay examines the critical history of scholarship on Joyce's poetry, particularly the major trends and events in that history. Focusing on the Chamber Music poems and Joyce's formative years and biography, the essay then treats Pomes Penyeach and Joyce's ongoing identity as a poet. The essay also treats his satiric and occasional verse and examines Joyce's status as an Irish poet. Finally the essay briefly summarizes the argument and importance of the essays to follow in the collection.

This essay pursues a detailed examination of Joyce's poetic language along with the relation of Chamber Music to his later prose writings. Focusing on Joyce's response to the contrary examples of Verlaine and Rimbaud as he begins to explore the modes of modernist poetry, the essay argues that Joyce's “creative translation or mistranslation” of precursor poets reveals a nascent hard and critical modernity that pushes against the poems' apparent sentimentality and archaism. In a far-ranging study of Joyce's uses of orality and aurality, the essay reveals the connections between the early poems and Joyce's final poetic utterances in Finnegans Wake, all of which depend upon an oblique use of language, a “cambering” of utterance that shifts words away from poetic constraints, then back again to poetic forms.

This essay extends the groundbreaking work of Myra Russel on the musical elements and traditions of Chamber Music. By tracking Joyce's sources in nineteenth-century collections of Elizabethan music and lyrics, it considers what exactly Chamber Music owes to these variant sources and to what extent the poems do indeed follow Elizabethan concepts of song. The essay argues that Joyce ultimately inscribes the movement in poetry, begun in the Elizabethan era, away from music towards the printed page--from dance to song, from music to print. For in fact, most of the Chamber Music poems are quite un-singable, un-settable to music; yet the poems do attempt to parallel the effects of music, foretelling Joyce's remarkable efforts in the music of language (and the language of music) that culminates in “Sirens” and Finnegans Wake. In the most thorough and sophisticated discussion of music in Joyce's poetry, the essay concludes that this seems to be the impetus of the collection, to celebrate the inscrutability of putting music on the page.

This chapter presents Reich's keynote address at the 1989 annual meeting of Chamber Music America. He talks about his own ensemble and why non-Western music, early music, and jazz are good playing experiences for musicians.

This essay focuses on how Chamber Music is tied to the poetic tradition that precedes and surrounds it, revealing the extent of Joyce's remarkable indebtedness to and conversation with others, as well as the incipient signs of Joyce's defining originality and independence. The poems' obsession with betrayal and the solitary hero places Joyce within traditions of 19th- and early 20th-century Irish literary forms, especially those poems of lost glory by Mangan and of betrayal and loss in Moore's melodies. Examining Joyce's penchant for neologisms, his nonce words, his coinings, and his use of Skeats's etymological dictionary, shows that the poet of Chamber Music, like Stephen in Portrait, is as much enthralled by as in thrall to the places and words of English language, English history, and English literature. Emphasizing the presence of other texts, poets, and songs throughout Chamber Music, from the Song of Solomon to Elizabethan lyric sequences to the poems of Tennyson, the essay also offers a comparative reading of Chamber Music and Yeats's The Wind Among the Reeds, showing the Joyce/Yeats relation as well as on Joyce's status as a specifically modernist poet.

This essay discusses Chamber Music in conjunction with the composition of Joyce's elusive Dubliners story, “A Painful Case,” revealing the ways in which “A Painful Case” is a transformation of the language, ideas, images, and structure of Chamber Music, thereby showing the continuity of growth from Joyce's early efforts in lyric poetry to the Dubliners stories. The essay explores how Joyce's falling in love with Nora parallels the shift from the idealization and narcissism of the poems to the critical acuity of Dubliners, and how the terrifying despair of the final two lyrics in Chamber Music, the “tailpieces,” is expanded in the final meditations of “A Painful Case.” Ultimately, he argues, “A Painful Case” treats in more concentrated form one of the major concerns of Chamber Music: the conflicts between the self, the world, and religion. Its understated surface conceals the obsessions with love, paralysis, and betrayal that underlie both Chamber Music and the whole of Dubliners. Written within a year of the final Chamber Music poems, the story reveals a defining transition in Joyce's writing, moving from the early poems into his mature prose style, and brings into relief the very themes that will occupy Joyce throughout his career.

This chapter provides a detailed examination of a contemporary chamber work by a celebrated American composer, with: Social and Artistic Context; One Composer's Response; Sources of Autonomy: Definitions; Textural Overview; Pitch-Interval Dialogue; Deepening Engagements; and Closure.

This essay engages the questions of knowledge, faith, and authority in Joyce's writings, focusing in particular on the “Gnostic quest” Joyce pursues in Chamber Music. Beginning with the profound struggles over religious authority and knowledge that Joyce presents in Portrait and Ulysses, and that mirror many of Joyce's own personal struggles during the very period leading up to his composition of the Chamber Music poems, the essay examines Joyce's pursuit of alternative means of salvation, in particular the Gnostic hope of knowing one's way to the divine. Studying in detail the Chamber Music poems, following Joyce's original ordering of that sequence, we see that Joyce writes his way through a pattern of Gnostic pursuit, ultimately abandoning love in search of otherworldly wisdom and ecstatic union with the divine unmediated by Church or creed. The dispiriting shift in the second half of the sequence away from consummated earthly love and towards a solitary, wandering, perhaps fruitless quest for visionary knowledge intimates the pattern Joyce foresaw, but ultimately rejected, for himself.

In the aftermath of the bicentennial commission, Schuman's compositions took on a darker hue. During this period of his life, he began to lose a number of his close colleagues: Roy Harris, Seymour Shifrin, and Samuel Barber in particular. He also waged battle against the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which he founded, because he felt it had strayed from the vision he had for American music. This chapter examines the works from this period, including Schuman's only song cycle, set to words of Archibald MacLeish, as well as a number of works Schuman composed to commemorate various friends and colleagues. Even though much around Schuman appeared to be crepuscular, there was also evidence that a new day for his music was on the horizon.

This chapter examines a selection of music written for the classical clarinet, organized by the following genres: opera and concert arias; choral music; concertos; orchestral music; and chamber music. Important opera composers include Jean Benjamin de La Borde, Thomas Augustine Arne, François-Joseph Gossec, Johann Christian Bach, Matia Vento, André-Modeste Grétry, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Tommaso Giordani, Giovanni Paisiello, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Niccoló Isouard, and Carl Maria von Weber. Significant concertos were written by Johann Stamitz, Michael Haydn, Franz Xaver Pokorny, Carl Stamitz, Johan Mahon, Josef Beer, Mozart, Franz Wilhelm Tausch, Bernhard Henrik Crusell, Louis Spohr, and Weber. Important orchestral music was written by Johann Stamitz, Gossec, J. C. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Solo works without accompaniment were written by Abraham, Anton Stadler, and Amand Vanderhagen. Duets were written by William Bates, Valentin Roeser, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Gaspard Procksch, Vanderhagen, and others. Important sonatas were written by Jean Xavier Lefévre, Anton Ebert, and Weber. Other chamber music was written by Florian Gassmann, Georg Wagenseil, Johann Baptist Vanhal, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Reicha, Danzi, and others.

This introductory chapter discusses string chamber music, which fostered a variety of social interactions that helped build communities within communities in the nineteenth century. Chamber music for strings resists easy incorporation into the dominant narrative of musical developments centered on technological progress and compositional innovation. This is because chamber music's association with musical conservativism and orthodoxy has colored its reception since at least the 1840s. One reason for string music's apparent orthodoxy lies in the fact that stringed instruments themselves experienced only subtle organological changes in the nineteenth century in comparison to the piano or to wind instruments, which radically changed the timbre of the orchestra in symphonic and operatic works. Moreover, observations that string chamber music remained essentially conservative in its treatment of genre, form, harmony, and the like betray modern historiography's obsession with innovation.