Schubert

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time.  Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history.  Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define.  Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought.  For if this age understood time, it was through a melody.
  This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time.  Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music.  They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself.  At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

Notas al programa del cuarteto  núm. 14 en Re menor D. 810,  Der Tod und Das Mädchen (La muerte y la doncella).
Al igual que la vida de Schubert, La muerte y la doncella resulta una obra contrastante. Por un lado el temor y por otro la esperanza, ambos entablaban un diálogo personificados en una joven y asustada doncella con una imponente pero amable muerte, donde la dama suplica por su vida, aunque finalmente parece sucumbir al inminente final.

It has been said that Schubert’s Fifth Symphony was a copy of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony. However, in George Edwards’s article, A Palimpsest of Mozart in Schubert’s Symphony No.5, he concludes that Schubert did not mean to copy Mozart, but he was just “(doing) something clever” with Mozart. The word “Palimpsest” seems more to be an irony, rather than its literal meaning.
        This thesis investigates on the relationship between the two symphonies by comparing them in an analytical approach. The general purpose of this research is to further examine Edwards’s final statement through comparing and analyzing the other movements of both works. These movements will be compared in various aspects, including melody, harmony, sections, forms, phrases, orchestrations, dynamics, texture and typical characteristics. Scott Folgesong’s analysis will also be taken as reference. Through this analysis, I hope to find out Schubert’s way of composition for his Fifth Symphony, so as to prove whether Edwards’s assumptions are right. After this research, I hope to prevent the scholars from misunderstanding these two compositions.

This paper seeks to open the inquiry into an inviting but elusive topic (which should no doubt be part in its turn of a larger inquiry into Beckett’s relations with Romanticism in general, and German Romanticism in particular, in both literature and painting and music). Schubert is the composer whom Beckett loved above all others. The paper investigates the nature of the imaginative affinities that can be recognised between the two artists by asking what Beckett might have heard in two songs from the cycle WINTERREISE, which he considered Schubert’s “masterwork”.

Images of Schubert in portraiture often seemingly emphasise the comfortable amiability of the familiar beloved and bespectacled Viennese songsmith. Furthermore, the famously laconic pose struck in the Wilhelm August Rieder painting belies the existence of tensions under that calm exterior which are only ever fully revealed in Schubert’s music. It is almost incomprehensible that a life as short in duration as it was devoid of drama could have inspired works that speak to us as profoundly as any of the complexities and emotional richness of the human spirit.

What role does the general public have in metaphors?
The answer lies in the comprehensive application of the metaphor to the wider field of all the arts, and specifically architecture and music.  Recalling that much has already been written about the relationships and analogies between the two this work explores neither the work nor architecture but their part of a metaphoric holism  whereby he or she (user) completes a metaphor interacting with more value than the mere sum of elementary components.
The commonalities and differences of music and architecture highlight the commonality of composer, performers, audience and users.  The architect is likened to the composer and their commitment to project their experience to the user/audience through builders and performers into the work.  This monograph refers to the author's notes from a lecture series at Yale University: Architecture the making of metaphors involving, amongst others, Paul Weiss and William J. Gordon.
Additionally, this work recalls Daniel MacGalvray's research from his article in the proper Education of Musicians and Architects".  The discussion about the kind of effort expended to appreciate music and architecture refers to George Dodds  On the place of Architectural speculation.  April 22, 1993, on the evening of Earth Day's twenty-third anniversary my wife and I attended a concert of  The Clementi Ensemble in a pre-engineered metal building" in the Dhahran Academy in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.  But my mind was not on the concert, as such, but the context and the circumstances of what we all expected to experience from these four fine musicians.  We also compared this experience to when we helped John McConnell and UThant stage"  in central park (that day the United Nations declared Earth Day a world legal holiday); and, the year before the Mayor of New York in Union Square.

Indeed, the evening was replete with making leaps back into history to seemingly unrelated events.  Even the musical program of Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and Dvorak conjured "barocco" visions of courtly recitals of other periods and places.  We also noticed the many languages and dresses of the audience and yet we were all attending this one concert.  It then occurred to me that we were all participating in a metaphoric event which had everything to do with architecture.  Perhaps this event and our role as an audience and participants in this metaphor could shed light on the user’s role in works of architecture.  Because, that night we were audience, participants and users.  The persons of the metaphor So much have already been written about the relationship between music and architecture.  Particularly about music's design components and overall modes and meanings.
But this night I realized that the audience to this concert was not unlike a building’s.  We both had a relationship to a Context: weaving together of words, connections; coherence; the interrelated conditions in which something exists. We were a group of listeners, spectators and preceptors; reading, viewing and listening in public.
Metaphors, Architecture & Music
We were amongst those to whom things were made audible by the originator, designer, assembler and composer of the works.  Before playing each piece one of the musicians would remind us to remember the composer, his intentions about the work and his life in relation to the work.  It occurred to me that I had not read anything about metaphor's relationship to architecture.  Particularly about their performance; yet it was the performance in which we all were involved. 

Having already been to other recitals, in addition to listening to the sound of the music one also watches the communication between players.  It is as though one is watching a "musical conversation".  Recitals seem to have that quality.  Each plays the libretto composed to create interactions between players.  But they add so much more by the movement of their body, head and eyes.  Their face expresses agreement and satisfaction about the timing, quality and acoustics of what they hear and see.  We are watching them make a metaphor between themselves and the composer, the audience, and all using the years of skill with their instruments.  This evening’s instruments were the violin, cello, viola and piano.  I noticed the way in which each of the players positioned themselves on their chairs in relationship to each other, the stage and the audience.  They could do little about the theatre or the metal building except ask that only during the performance the air-conditioning be shut off because of its' noise.  All musicians, dancers and actors have specific routines, responses and actions which as letters in a word, words in sentence, etc, string together to complete the intended metaphor.