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The first two movements of the Piano Concerto were sketched in 1926, and the third movement in 1930. The work is dedicated to Miss Harriet Cohen. There are three movements: Toccata leading to Romanza leading to Fuga chromatica con Finale alla Tedesca. There is no break between the movements. After various episodes a stretto on a dominant pedal is reached, built up chiefly on an augmentation of part of the fugue subject with which the subject and counter-subject of the fugue are combined. A cadenza for the pianoforte separates the fugue and the Finale, the subjects of which are the same as those of the fugue, but treated harmonically rather than contrapuntally; and finally there is another cadenza for the pianoforte. The cadenza ends with a quotation two bars long from a contemporary composer, added “according to my promise.” Then a few bars of Allegro bring the Concerto to an end.

Last movements are, very often, failures compared to the rest of the work to which they belong. Whether this difficult state of things affects the composition intrinsically or not, it certainly does affect the impression of the work on its hearers. Sometimes the difficulty may be solved by an undisguised appeal to the sensibilities, as in the Finale of the Symphonie Pathétique or by a series of short intellectual exercises, as is the case where the last movement takes the form of variations; but these two solutions only cover a few instances. In almost all cases the complete scheme seems to demand that very kind of movement which, if not carefully manipulated, produces the drowsiness we wish to avoid; that is to say, the usual vigorous, swinging Allegro. In a movement such as this, no amount of thematic beauty or structural interest will serve to rivet the jaded attention of the listener.

This chapter shows an ominous side to the finale of Wasps: the false, quasi-tragic liberation of Cratinus’s mode, usually interpreted as genuinely comic. The chapter starts with the account of Philocleon’s disastrous performance at an aristocratic symposium and violent arrival onstage, exploring how his misuse of Aesop exposes Cratinus’s generic errancy. In the final scene, the dance contest between Philocleon and a mediocre tragedian’s sons suggests a paradoxical assimilation of Cratinean comedy to tragedy. Amid a complex of alignments involving Aristophanic comedy, Aesopic fable, iambos, and tragedy, the mad father Philocleon’s enthrallment to the ragged affect of Cratinean comedy (in opposition to the Aristophanic and Aesopic) demonstrates the failure of his son Bdelycleon’s—and Aristophanes’—rehabilitative efforts. Yet after the rejection of the therapeutic binding of the first Clouds, the unhappy ending awaiting the audience as well as Philocleon portends a grim future for the momentarily triumphant Cratinean mode—a literary-critical demotion in a contest of aesthetics. Productive of a discourse of generic affect, Aristophanes’ narrative of failure will make the father’s (and audience’s) rejection a mere setback on the path to a canonical embrace.

This chapter examines how David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me enriched and expanded the underlying mythology of the Twin Peaks universe despite being narrowed in scope. It details the excitement of fans when it was announced that David Lynch was going to return to Twin Peaks in the form of a feature film. It also reveals how fans did not anticipate the Twin Peaks film to be a prequel that shows the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer. The chapter points out how Fire Walk With Me film was not intended to appease those who wanted to know the fates of the many characters after the series finale, but to delve deeper into the mysteries surrounding Laura's death and the connection to a supernatural realm. It examines Fire Walk With Me's shooting script that several scenes which include series regulars in cameo appearances.

The G that opens the finale of the B♭-Major Sonata does not simply mark a new beginning. Its resonance stirs a memory, highly specific even though subliminal, of the first movement's second phrase, its first response to its own beginning. By the time it returns as the theme of the finale, a rich and elaborate web of associations has been gathered from all the intervening music. When the G recalls that first response, summoning it into self-definition as a theme, it establishes the thematic identity of the finale with roots that run deeply throughout the entire sonata. Equally pervasive roots underlie the much more explicit return of the opening phrase of th0065 A-Major Sonata's first movement in its finale. Here the original phrase returns, in cancrizans, as the concluding phrase, in what Charles Rosen has called “only a framing device.” The finale of the C-Minor Sonata also contains a block of musical material that returns, in clearly recognizable form, from an earlier movement. This chapter examines the returns of these three musical blocks.

The last of the “War Sonatas,” the Eighth Sonata is the most expansive of Prokofiev's sonatas. By the time it was completed, the outcome of the war had become clear. This may explain both the victorious coda of the finale and the general reflective mood of the first movement. Listening closely, one will find that the first movement in particular unfolds in an unhurried fashion. Some of the Eighth Sonata's material was taken from earlier unfinished incidental music for projects connected with works by Alexander Pushkin: a theater production of Eugene Onegin and a film version of The Queen of Spades. Unfortunately, neither of these projects was realized, nor was a theater production of Boris Godunov, for which Prokofiev wrote music listed in his catalogue as op. 70bis.

This chapter examines the intermovement connections of the final two movements in Mahler's Fifth Symphony—the Adagietto and the Rondo-Finale. It shows how the questions of aesthetic meaning and biographical context raised by the Adagietto are complicated by the fact that the finale of the Fifth Symphony has generated its own share of controversy since the appearance in 1960 of Theodor Adorno's classic study Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik. The chapter studies these paired final movements of the Fifth Symphony and explores the nature of their interrelationship. It then assesses Mahler's techniques of integration in light of the influence on his style of Bach and Wagner as well as his interest in the aesthetics of polarity as articulated by one of his favorite writers, Jean Paul. In this context, the chapter returns to Adorno's conviction that “brokenness” is the key to Mahler's music.

In the late 1760s two characteristic types of movement—the contrapuntal minuet and the stormy finale—emerged as conventions of the minor-key subgenre. The two types occurred less frequently after the early 1770s. The chapter examines the style of each type and analyzes examples by Vaňhal, Haydn, Mozart, and others, paying special attention to the expressive qualities of Haydn’s contrapuntal minuets.

This chapter begins with a discussion on all the ways to notate music other than in European staff notation and the ways in which music can be written for many Western styles. Tablature, Nashville Numbers, time unit box system (TUBS), and MIDI notation, lyric sheets, chord charts, and rap flow charts are explored. The chapter then briefly explores the free industry-standard notation software Finale, Sibelius, and Dorico, followed by a section delving into free and cloud-based software for schools like Noteflight and Flat.io and an explanation of some more non-conventional notation softwares such as HookPad and 1Chart. A table is inserted to give an overview of the software discussed in this chapter.

for the class, but Mrs. Jones would have the summer to assemble the curriculum and lesson plans, in consultation with the principal and the other music teachers. They all recognized that starting this class would bring new students to their excellent music department and could only draw more public attention to their good work. The lab would have 15 student stations and an additional station for the teacher. None of the music teachers or the school’s administrators had any expertise in designing computer labs, so they left that task up to the district’s architects. The information technology (IT) department was enlisted to set up all of the hardware and software and to make appropriate network and server connections, with enough time for Mrs. Jones to get used to the lab before the school year would begin.

The last chapter offers a reading of the Seventh from the perspective of its association with Wagner’s Meistersinger, which sounds loud and clear in the Finale, and in a more subtle way in other movements. While the Meistersinger reference has been duly noted, the question of the nature and function of this allusion at the core of the symphony has not been explored in depth. First, this chapter argues that Mahler’s clear gesture toward Meistersinger in the Finale prompts the listener to hear other elements throughout the whole symphony in relation to Wagner’s opera. Mahler’s use of quartal harmony in the first movement, for example, resonates with a particular passage in Meistersinger Act II. Second, the connections between these two works crystallize around the character of Beckmesser, the pedantic critic who initially claims to know what makes art meaningful, but whose own music is ultimately perceived as meaningless.

The long-held view of the Finale as an “embarrassment,” largely influenced by Theodor Adorno’s judgment, as well as the fact that most of the extant compositional materials for Mahler’s Seventh concern this movement, make it a good starting point for a close reading of the work. This chapter begins by examining the Finale in its finished form, in terms of structure and motivic treatment, with a focus on its strong rhetorics. Two significant aspects of the Finale are emphasized: moments of interruption in the musical flow—“in-between” spaces that have both an introductory and a concluding function—and the persistent cadencing of the movement. Early and more recent readings of the Finale are then discussed, all highlighting the interpretive difficulties raised by this movement.

This chapter explores physical traces of Mahler’s compositional process for the Finale of the Seventh, asking to what extent compositional materials can inform an interpretation of the music. “In-betweens” and inserts constitute one of the main characteristics of this movement. As shown in Chapter 5, one of these interruptions was added later in a preliminary draft. This is a case of striking resonance between the genesis of a passage and what the music achieves in its final form. A close reading of the compositional materials for the Finale questions the idea of the Seventh as a consequence of the Sixth, showing that the composition of both works was more entangled than previously thought. The numerous connections that can be drawn between different manuscript sources containing preliminary sketches (sketchbooks and larger leaves) allow us to trace some of the compositional experiments Mahler pursued before abandoning them in the final version.

Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro; 1786) was the composer’s first finished attempt to break into the Italian-dominated world of opera in Vienna. Its librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, adapted a highly controversial French comedy by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais that struck to the heart of contemporary Revolutionary rhetoric. Mozart also rode on the coattails of Giovanni Paisiello’s comic opera Il barbiere di Siviglia in an attempt to make his mark. As the first of the three Mozart-da Ponte operas, Figaro exploited the talents of singers whom the composer knew well, such as Francesco Benucci and Anna (Nancy) Storace, the first Figaro and Susanna. It also expanded the forms of opera buffa by including ensembles and extended finales where the music needed to engage with dramatic interaction rather than just individual expression.