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Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound presents Busoni as an innovator inspired not only by past musical traditions but also by a contemporary interest in experimentalism and architecture. Author Erinn E. Knyt explores how Busoni's compositional innovation made a lasting impact in musical language and spatialized architectural music.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Ferruccio Busoni and Architecture
- Chapter One: The Cathedral of the Future and Young Classicality
- Chapter Two: Busoni's Architectural Structures
- Chapter Three: The Circle of Sound
- Chapter Four: Busoni's Liquid Architecture
- Chapter Five: Beyond Busoni: Building Music in the Twentieth Century
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Erinn E. Knyt is Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy, which was awarded an AMS 75 Pays Endowment Book Subvention Grant, and in 2018, she received an AMS Teaching Award for her article "Teaching Music History Pedagogy to Graduate Students." Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth- century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, Bach Reception, and performance studies.
Summary
Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound presents Busoni as an innovator inspired not only by past musical traditions but also by a contemporary interest in experimentalism and architecture. Author Erinn E. Knyt explores how Busoni's compositional innovation made a lasting impact in musical language and spatialized architectural music.
Additional text
Erinn Knyt shows how Busoni's abiding fascination with architecture as a medium and a metaphor illuminates his ambivalent relation to early musical modernism on multiple levels: from his allegiance to Bach and Mozart, the famous Bach transcriptions, the massive yet florid op. 39 Piano Concerto or the polystylistic labyrinth of Doktor Faust, and a high-modernist legacy from Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe to Xenakis and Morton Feldman. Connections with Jugendstil architect Henry Van de Velde and the Bauhaus school inform a conception of music as spatialized sound placing Busoni's commitments to old and new music, his own works, and his mentorship of diverse modernist talents in a striking new light. Knyt is unsurpassed as guide to all aspects of Busoni's multi-faceted career.
