As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present.
The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music.
Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.
Nicole Grimes is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture, Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (co-edited with Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx), and Mendelssohn Perspectives (co-edited with Angela Mace), and numerous articles and chapters on the music of Brahms, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Schoenberg, Liszt, Wolfgang Rihm, and Donnacha Dennehy. Her research has been funded by a Marie Curie International Fellowship from the European Commission, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She is currently at work on a large-scale analytical project on the music of Emilie Mayer (1812-1883).
Reuben Phillips is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Music in Oxford. He was a doctoral student at Princeton University and was awarded the Karl Geiringer Scholarship of the American Brahms Society for his PhD dissertation that explored Brahms's engagement with German Romantic literature. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin, Edinburgh University's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and of an Edison Fellowship from the British Library. In addition to his work on Brahms, he has written articles on the British music scholar Donald Francis Tovey and the exhumation and reburial of composers in late nineteenth-century Vienna.
