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

Edward Klorman

Apr 2016 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Edward Klorman is Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Viola at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He also teaches graduate analysis seminars and chamber music performance at The Juilliard School, where he was founding chair of the Music Theory and Analysis department. Committed to intersections between musical scholarship and performance, he currently serves as co-chair of the Performance and Analysis Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory. He has performed as guest artist with the Borromeo, Orion, and Ying Quartets and the Lysander Trio, and he is featured on two albums of chamber music from Albany Records. He has published and presented widely on topics in the performance of eighteenth-century chamber music.