Music, Structure, Thought: Selected Essays

Among the most original and provocative musicological writers of his generation, James Hepokoski has elaborated new paradigms of inquiry for both music history and music theory. Advocating fundamental shifts of methodological reorientation within the quest for potential musical meanings, his work spans both disciplines and offers substantial challenges for each. At its core is the conviction that a close study of musical genres, procedures, and structures those qualities of a composition that are specifically musical is essential to any responsible hermeneutic enterprise. Selected from writings from 1984 to 2008, this collection of essays provides a generous introduction to the author's most innovative and influential work on a wide variety of topics: musicological methodology, issues of staging and performance, Italian opera, program music, and exemplary studies of individual pieces.

James Hepokoski is Professor in the Department of Music, Yale University, USA.

Contents: Introduction; Complete bibliography; Part 1 Historiography, History, Methodology: The Dahlhaus project and its extra-musicological sources; Beethoven reception: the symphonic tradition; Some grounding principles of sonata theory. Part 2 Italian Operwa: Ottocento opera as cultural drama: generic mixtures in Il Trovatore; Staging Verdi's operas: the single 'correct' performance; Operatic stagings: positions and paradoxes: a reply to David J. Levin; Structure, implication and the end of Suor Angelica; Un bel dì? Vedremo! Anatomy of a delusion. Part 3 Structure and Content: Shorter Essays: Formulaic openings in Debussy; Culture clash; Masculine/feminine; Temps perdu. Part 4 Symphonic Readings: Fiery-pulsed libertine or domestic hero? Strauss's Don Juan reinvestigated; Framing Till Eulenspiegel; Gaudery, romance and the 'Welsh' tune: Introduction and Allegro, Op. 47; Index.