Books and Journals
SKU: UT.QC-5
Edited by Fabio Morabito
and Louise Bernard de
Raymond. Paperback (Soft
Cover). Quaderni
Clementiani. Classical.
Books and Journals. Ut
Orpheus #QC 5. Published
by Ut Orpheus (UT.QC-5).
ISBN 9788881095223.
6.5 x 9.5
inches.
Essays
by Louise Benrard de
Raymond, Muriel Boulan,
Thomas Christensen,
Etienne Jardin, Ellen
Lockhart, Fabio Morabito,
William O'Hara, Alban
Ramaut, Annette Richards,
Michael B.
Ward
The
nineteenth-century
composer has a persistent
image problem: inspired,
unworldly, male, writing
works of genius for
posterity. If it has been
the project of
musicologists for the
last 30 years to erode
this checklist, he
lingers still like a bad
smell. This book uses
Antoine Reicha
(1770-1836) as a case
study through which to
develop alternative
approaches to the
nineteenth-century
composer. That Reicha was
a composition teacher and
prolific writer of
instruction manuals, for
example, provides an
opportunity (and new
types of sources) to
focus on composers'
attempts at becoming
composers. How can we
catch them 'in the
making', exploring not a
body of works and
achievements, but the
priorities and anxieties
of these individuals (the
knowledge they followed
or created) in crafting
their artistic identities
for the public? What
modes of music
historiography and
analysis might help
explore Reicha's and his
contemporaries' music
beyond mapping it within
local or national
traditions and their
transfer? Can a networked
model of music-history
writing - we might call
it 'a history of music
with no protagonist' -
assist musicologists in
working on non-canonical
composers without
retrospectively making
monuments out of them?
These and other questions
frame this volume, in
order not only to
reassess Reicha, but also
our disciplinary toolkit:
to ask how/why/to what
end we tell stories about
composers in musicology
more generally.
Gene Raymond
