Music for a Mixed Taste Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann's Instrumental Works

by Zohn, Steven

• ISBN13: 9780195169775
• ISBN10: 0195169778
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Georg Philipp Telemann gave us one of the richest legacies of instrumental music from the eighteenth century. Though considered a definitive contribution to the genre during his lifetime, his concertos, sonatas, and suites were then virtually ignored for nearly two centuries following his death. Yet these works are now among the most popular in the baroque repertory. In Music for a Mixed Taste , Steven Zohn considers Telemann's music from stylistic, generic, and cultural perspectives. He investigates the composer's cosmopolitan "mixed taste"-a blending of the French, Italian, English, and Polish national styles-and his imaginative expansion of this concept to embrace mixtures of the old (late baroque) and new ( galant ) styles. Telemann had an equally remarkable penchant for generic amalgamation, exemplified by his pioneering role in developing hybrid types such as the sonata in concerto style ("Sonate auf Concertenart") and overture-suite with solo instrument ("Concert en ouverture"). Zohn examines the extramusical meanings of Telemann's "characteristic" overture-suites, which bear descriptive texts associating them with literature, medicine, politics, religion, and the natural world, and which acted as vehicles for the composer's keen sense of musical humor. Zohn then explores Telemann's unprecedented self-publishing enterprise at Hamburg, and sheds light on the previously unrecognized borrowing by J.S. Bach from a Telemann concerto. Music for a Mixed Taste further reveals how Telemann's style polonaise generates musical and social meanings through the timeless oppositions of Orient-Occident, urban-rural, and serious-comic.

Author Biography

Steven Zohn is Associate Professor of Music Studies at Temple University. The recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Musicological Society, and the German Academic Exchange Service, he has published widely on the music of the German late baroque. He is also a noted performer on historical flutes.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

List of Musical Examples

List of Tables

List of Figures

Prologue: Styles and Sources

Telemann and the German Mixed Taste

Genius in the Closet

The Overture-Suites

Acquiring a Mixed Taste: Telemann as "grand partisan de la musique Francaise"

Telemann as Lullist

Tradition versus Innovation

The Concert en ouverture and Concerto en suite

The Overture-Suite in Retrospect

Telemann's Mimetic Art: The Characteristic Overture-Suites

Characteristic Titles/Staging the Overture-Suite

The Civic Water Music/Images of Court and Country

Telemann's Wit: Burlesque, Parody, and Satire

The Concertos

"Niemals recht von Herzen gegangen"?: Telemann's Concertos

The Eisenach Concertos

Concertos for the Eloquent Oboe

Concertos alla francese

Telemann and the German Ripieno Concerto

The Late Frankfurt and Hamburg Concertos

Telemann's Orchestras

Bach's Debt Repaid with Interest: A Case Study of Transformative Imitation

Bach's Borrowing, Telemann's Model

Bach, Telemann, and the Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics of Musical Borrowing

The Sonatas

"Something for Everyone's Taste": Telemann's Sonatas to 1725

Solos and Trios in the Italian Style

Trios alla francese

The "True Touchtone of a Genuine Contrapuntist": Quartets for Strings and Winds

When is a Quartet Not a Quartet?

Sonatas in Five to Seven Parts

Two Parisian Piracies

The Frankfurt Sonata Publications

Telemann and the Sonate auf Concertenart

Defining the Sonate auf Concertenart

Titles as Signifiers of Genre

Reimagining the Sonata (Concerto)

The Vivaldi Cult at Dresden and the Origins of the Sonate auf Concertenart

Telemann's Sonaten auf Concertenart

The "Sonate en concert" and French Vivaldisme

The Aesthetics of Mixed Genres

The Hamburg Publications

Telemann in the Marketplace: The Composer as Self-Publisher

Setting up Shop

Telemann's Subscribers

Production Methods

Closing Shop

Telemann fur Kenner und Liebhaber: The Music of the Hamburg Publications

Sonates sans basse

Essercizii musici

Reading the Faithful Music Master

Menuets and Marches

Quadri

Methodical Sonatas and Nouvelles sonatines

The Fantastic Style

Musique de table and Six ouvertures a 4 ou 6

Divertimenti

XII Solos a violin ou traverseere

Six concerts et six suites

An Omaggio a Corelli?

Parisian Sonatas

Galanterien

Telemann's Polish Style and the "True Barbaric Beauty" of the Musical Other

"Gedancken fur ein gantzes Leben": Telemann in Poland

"A Country in the Moon": Poland, Pastoral, and the Past

Representing Poland Musically

Afterward

Glossary

Bibliography

Index of Telemann's Compositions

General Index

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