The volume entitled Language, Structure, Musical Semantics in the Piano Sonatas of Russian Composers of the First Half of the 20th Century provides a general and detailed perspective on the sonata genre, in the work of composers Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Originating in the Western European musical tradition, the sonata remains a complex genre of academic type, which is difficult to submit to modal language, programmatic genres or folk influences. However, it acquired new expressive valences in the vision of composers from Russian musical culture, through the peculiarities of musical language (melodic, rhythmic, structural, but especially harmonic and writing), as it results from the analysis of the six sonatas approached in this scientific study. The structures of form encountered are different in principle of organization, harmonic language, degree of complexity, offering a broad and diverse perspective on the categories of form encountered and the particular adaptation in the work of the four Russian composers. The volume has a synthetic overview, being structured in the chronological order of the approached composers. In order to facilitate access to certain parts of the analyzed sonatas, we have specified in the Table of Contents the types of form corresponding to each movement or work, as the case may be, so that they can be approached according to the object of interest of the readers.
Rhetorical Strategies in Renaissance Sacred Polyphony: Three Examples for Undergraduate Music Classroom
Source(s) of analysis: Score Musical work: Circumdederunt me, Lamentations of Jeremiah, Super flumina Babilonis Year of creation: 1549, 1585, 1587 Composer's name: Cristóbal de Morales, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Tomás Luis de Victoria Methods of analysis: Rhetoric analysis, Style analysis
Target Group / Study LevelLevel of music analysis knowledge: Beginner, Intermediate
Study cycle: Bachelor
Read more
