The heroic in music

ISBN:

Call Number:

Keywords:

Notes:

The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music. The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-276) and index.Holy heroes: on the varieties of a metaphor and its musical expression in the medieval Historiae / Roman Hankeln -- The heroic in music and the musicality of the hero in late sixteenth-century England / Katherine Butler -- Virtù eroica: heroic music, social norms, and musical reflections in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy / Berthold Over -- Handel's heroes / Jonathan Rhodes Lee -- Design principles for the musical heroic / Lawrence M. Zbikowski -- Tonal relationships and spiritual heroism in Beethoven's late style / Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska -- Music, content, and context: the case of nineteenth-century Hungarian music in the light of the Romantic heroic vision / Csilla Pethő-Vernet -- The Austro-German heroic in the music-hermeneutical era: musical discourse in the service of nationalist-patriotic armament between 1887 and the early 1930s / Beate Kutschke -- Heroicizing Handel in the Third Reich: towards the collapse of political propaganda / Juliane Riepe -- Soviet war symphonies and the heroic Russian epic / Nathan Seinen -- "Someone to save the day": popular music, Springsteen and the Circle of Hero production / Dietrich Helms -- Émilie du Châtelet, Kaija Saariaho, and heroes of the twenty-first century / Judith Lochhead.