Text-music relationships in the lieder of Johannes Brahms.
Item
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Title
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Text-music relationships in the lieder of Johannes Brahms.
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Identifier
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AAI9218257
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identifier
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9218257
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Creator
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Platt, Heather Anne.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Carl Schachter
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music
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Abstract
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While Brahms's contemporaries report that he emphasized the relationship of text and music in his lieder, many of the secondary sources from Wolf onwards claim that he was insensitive to the texts. The contradiction between these sources suggests that the text-music relationships in Brahms's lieder should be reassessed. In this dissertation I examine the text-music synthesis in eighteen of Brahms's songs. These songs have been selected because they exhibit one of three unusual tonal structures: the first note of the fundamental line is delayed by an extended arpeggiation, and arrives only in the song's final phrases; the tonic arrives only at the end of a stanza or an entire song; the expected structural dominant is suppressed.;Through a two-fold approach to eighteen of Brahms's songs, this dissertation demonstrates that: (1) currently, text-based analyses of Brahms lieder emphasize correct declamation at the expense of other aspects of the text's structure that are also depicted by the music, including punctuation and line structure; and (2) tonal analyses of the songs using Schenkerian techniques reveal numerous subtle relationships between the music and text in both foreground and middleground structural levels. My analyses demonstrate that the relationship between the text and music in Brahms's lieder is much closer than is commonly asserted.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
