San Antonio College Library

The two-hundred-year development of the symphonic form is traced through a discussion of representative compositions from each period. Narrative covers background and heritage of the classical symphony in Austria and Germany; developments from 1780 to 1914; and the evolution of the symphony in the twentieth century from an international perspective. The student and scholar will find this text rich with illustrations and musical examples. -- Amazon.com....

Brahms's symphonies represent one of the most important bodies of work to come from the second half of the nineteenth century, when many of the difficult issues that have confronted composers and scholars in our own century were formulated. As the other arts at that time were turning away from romanticism, music was witnessing an extended confrontation between two attitudes that had been fundamental to musical romanticism in the preceding generations:...

Associated through descriptive texts with literature, politics, religion, and other subjects, 'characteristic' symphonies offer an opportunity to study instrumental music as it engages important social and political debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This first full-length study of the genre illuminates the relationship between symphonies and their aesthetic and social contexts by focussing on the musical representation of feeling,...

Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 82-7 are seminal works in Haydn's output and mark a new level of compositional attainment, launching the important cycle of mature Haydn symphonies written for an international audience. Three chapters of the book deal with the reception of Haydn's symphonies in Paris, documenting the extent to which they dominated the repertoire of important public concert series. The aesthetic basis of Haydn's reception in Paris in the 1780s...