The waltz: A musical interpretation through the steps.
Item
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Title
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The waltz: A musical interpretation through the steps.
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Identifier
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AAI9830777
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identifier
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9830777
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Creator
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Yaraman, Sevin Huriye.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Leo Treitler
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Date
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1998
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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 | Dance | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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Music for the waltz--more so than any other genre of dance music--has been transformed into many different musical styles and traditions. The stylistic transformations of the waltz resulted in part from the social and artistic functions that particular waltzes or groups of waltzes served: (1) as music for social dance, (2) in dramatic musical compositions (ballet and opera), (3) in instrumental musical genres, or (4) as waltzes about the waltz--those compositions that refer to the historical and social implications of the genre by making the waltz itself the subject. In Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, A. B. Marx explained that waltzes composed for social dancing must reflect musically the dance's foot work and turning motion. Viennese waltzes by Lanner, the Strauss family, and others display remarkably consistent musical representations of the dance's characteristics in their metric hierarchy, rhythmic accompaniment, and melody. In concert waltzes composed for listening rather than for dancing, composers such as Chopin, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky used the freedom from the actual dance steps as the impetus for refining and sharpening these defining characteristics of the genre, but without eliminating them or effacing the pieces' identities as waltzes. The reception of the waltz as dance contributed directly to the meaning of the waltz as music: for the first time in Western dance, the waltz dispensed with groups of dancers and brought men and women face-to-face, a position considered overtly erotic and thus looked upon with great disapproval in many circles, almost exclusively for its purported negative effects upon women. Innumerable restrictions were placed on women's participation. As a result, the waltz--both dance and music--acquired a distinctly gendered meaning. In Verdi's La traviata, Puccini's La boheme, and Berg's Wozzeck, the composers relied on the waltz's contradictory meanings of individual pleasure and social disapprobation to portray their woman characters and their roles in the development of the plot. In his ballets, Tchaikovsky altered or distorted the waltz's musical conventions to signal a significant turn of events. In Ravel's La Valse and in Berg's Wozzeck, each composer, within his own musical language, made self-conscious reference to the waltz, using it as an idiom that brings to mind the style and meaning of the 19th-century Viennese Waltz.
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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.
