Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music

Peter H. Smith is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Notre Dame.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Quintessential Brahms and the Paradox of the C-Minor Piano Quartet: A Representative yet Exceptional WorkPart I2. Analytical Preliminaries: Brahms's Sonata Forms and the Idea of Dimensional Counterpoint3. A Schoenbergian Perspective: Compositional Economy, Developing Recapitulation, and Large-Scale Form4. Brahms and Schenker: A Mutual Response to Sonata Form5. Brahms's Expository Strategies: Two-Part Second Groups, Three-Key Expositions, and Modal ShiftsPart II6. Toward an Expressive Interpretation: Correlations for Suicidal Despair7. Intertextual Resonances: Tragic Expression, Dimensional Counterpoint, and the Great C-Minor TraditionNotesBibliographyIndex

For its sincere committal to such an important message, brilliant use of dimensional noncongruence to lay bare the formal complexities of the Viennese tradition, and numerous insights into the structure and expression of one of Brahms's most tragic musical portrayals, Smith's book should be valued by music scholars and welcomed as a significant contribution to the study of meaning in Brahms's music.(Music Theory Online) For more than a decade Peter Smith has published extraordinarily insightful analyses of Brahms's instrumental music. In Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music, he expands his focus to investigate the intersections of structure and expression, and in so doing he deftly explains the ways in which Brahms's Piano Quartet in C minor op. 60 'correlates with the agony of an individual about to commit suicide'.48.2 2004(Journal of Music Theory)