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This book offers the first detailed reception history of adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach's
Goldberg Variations from 1800-2020. By focusing on ways the piece has been arranged, transcribed, and reworked, or quoted in in film, dance, literature, visual art, and digital media, it reveals changing views about the role of the composer and score that have impacted recent performance practices and notions of the work concept. Beyond this, it features the work of composers, many from underrepresented backgrounds, who have recently deconstructed Bach by reimagining the subjects, compositional procedures, and forms, using contemporary compositional approaches.
List of contents
- Reimagining J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations
- 1: Prelude: A Reception History of the Goldberg Variations in the Long Nineteenth Century
- 2: The Goldberg Variations Deconstructed: Transcriptions, Arrangements, and Re-Compositions, 1930-2020
- 3: The Goldberg Variations Revisited: Multi-Composer Works, Poststructuralism, and the Open Work Concept
- 4: Dancing to the Goldberg Variations
- 5: Bach as Machine/Bach as Human : The Goldberg Variations in Film Soundtracks
- 6: The Goldberg Variations as Protest and Tragedy: Intertextual Readings in Theatrical Works of the Twentieth- and Twenty-First Centuries
- 7: Coda: The Goldberg Variations as Text, Color, and Image
About the author
Erinn E. Knyt is Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth- century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, Bach Reception, and performance studies. Her first book (2017), explores Ferruccio Busoni's pedagogical practices and his relationship with early and mid-career composition mentees. It was awarded an AMS 75 Pays Endowment Book Subvention. Knyt's second book, Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound (2023), which also received an American Musicological Society Book Subvention, discusses Busoni's innovations as a composer in relation to contemporaneous architectural trends. Knyt was also awarded the 2018 American Musicological Society Teaching Award.
