Style and Music

by Leonard B. Meyer

• ISBN13: 9780226521527
• ISBN10: 0226521524
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780226521602
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2024-12-23
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

Leonard Meyer proposes a theory of style and style change that relates the choices made by composers to the constraints of psychology, cultural context, and musical traditions. He explores why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others. Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time. "A monumental work. . . . Most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this interaction."--Choice "Probes the foundations of musical research precisely at the joints where theory and history fold into one another."--Kevin Korsyn, Journal of American Musicological Society "A remarkably rich and multifaceted, yet unified argument. . . . No one else could have brought off this immense project with anything like Meyer's command."--Robert P. Morgan, Music Perception "Anyone who attempts to deal with Romanticism in scholarly depth must bring to the task not only musical and historical expertise but unquenchable optimism. Because Leonard B. Meyer has those qualities in abundance, he has been able to offer fresh insight into the Romantic concept."--Donal Henahan, New York Times

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
PART I: THEORY	3	(66)
1 Toward a Theory of Style	3	(35)
2 Style Analysis	38	(31)
PART II: HISTORY, INNOVATION, AND CHOICE	69	(94)
3 Thoughts About History	69	(35)
4 Innovation--Reasons and Sources	104	(31)
5 Choice and Replication	135	(28)
PART III: MUSIC AND IDEOLOGY: A SKETCH-HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC	163	(174)
6 Romanticism--The Ideology of Elite Egalitarians	163	(55)
7 Convention Disguised--Nature Affirmed	218	(54)
8 Syntax, Form, and Unity	272	(65)
Epilogue: The Persistence of Romanticism	337	(16)
Bibliography of Works Cited	353	(12)
Index	365	(10)
Index of Musical Examples	375