Mozart's Music of Friends
Social Interplay in the Chamber Works

This study analyzes chamber music from Mozart's time within its highly social salon-performance context.

Edward Klorman (Author)

9781107474666, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 February 2017

358 pages, 15 b/w illus. 102 music examples
24.5 x 17 x 2 cm, 0.62 kg

'The sociability of music-making is one of its most highly desirable (and oft-forgotten) attributes, one that musicology has steadily begun to address (and long may that continue). Klorman's Mozart's Music of Friends is a prominent and very welcome landmark in this progress.' John Irving, Journal of the Royal Musical Association

In 1829 Goethe famously described the string quartet as 'a conversation among four intelligent people'. Inspired by this metaphor, Edward Klorman's study draws on a wide variety of documentary and iconographic sources to explore Mozart's chamber works as 'the music of friends'. Illuminating the meanings and historical foundations of comparisons between chamber music and social interplay, Klorman infuses the analysis of sonata form and phrase rhythm with a performer's sensibility. He develops a new analytical method called multiple agency that interprets the various players within an ensemble as participants in stylized social intercourse - characters capable of surprising, seducing, outwitting, and even deceiving one another musically. This book is accompanied by online resources that include original recordings performed by the author and other musicians, as well as video analyses that invite the reader to experience the interplay in time, as if from within the ensemble.

Foreword Patrick McCreless
Preface
Part I. Historical Perspectives: 1. The music of friends
2. Chamber music and the metaphor of conversation
3. Private, public, and playing in the present tense
Part II. Analytical Perspectives: 4. Analyzing from within the music: toward a theory of multiple agency
5. Multiple agency and sonata form
6. Multiple agency and meter
7. An afternoon at skittles: analysis of the 'Kegelstatt' Trio, K. 498
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], History [HB], Chamber ensembles [AVRD], Classical music [c 1750 to c 1830 AVGC4], Early music [up to c 1000 CE AVGC1], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Theory of music & musicology [AVA], Music [AV], Performance art [AFKP]