Musical Topics and Musical Performance

<p>The principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by later receivers albeit in a different context and with a need for historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980) introduced the idea of topics his relatively simple ideas have been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors. Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of musicology often embracing semiotics but its relationship to performance has received less attention. <i>Musical Topics and Musical Performance</i> thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as well as how performers have responded to such a presence in practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from composers as diverse as Beethoven Scriabin and Péter Eötvös. Using both scores and recordings the book presents a variety of original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of distinguished authors and addresses a neglected area of musicology and musical performance.</p>