Mozart's Grace / / Scott Burnham.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And...

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Bibliographic Details
Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
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Place / Publishing House:Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2012]
©2012
Year of Publication:2012
Edition:Course Book
Language:English
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource (208 p.) :; 4 halftones. 165 musical examples.
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Other title:Frontmatter --
CONTENTS --
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --
INVITATION --
I. BEAUTY AND GRACE --
II. THRESHOLDS --
III. GRACE AND RENEWAL --
KNOWING INNOCENCE --
NOTES --
BIBLIOGRAPHY --
INDEX
Summary:It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In Mozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9781400845118
9783110442502
DOI:10.1515/9781400845118?locatt=mode:legacy
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Scott Burnham.