Lateness and Brahms

Margaret Notley, an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas, has published widely on a number of topics. Her article "Late-Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music and the Cult of the Classical Adagio" won the 2000 Alfred Einstein Award given by the American Musicological Society.

"Lateness and Brahms brilliantly explores the ideological intertwinings between Austrian political life and the various genres of 'absolute' music, which have often been regarded as only abstract or purely aesthetic. Notley flings open the doors of cultural context and reception for Brahms at the end of his career. Uncovering the key debates surrounding this composer and his musical traditions, she restores crucial factors of local framing and connotation obvious to his contemporaries but largely lost to later generations. A rich tapestry of close reading and cultural interpretation, this indispensable book not only obliges us to rethink late Brahms and his world but also challenges us to confront how we have constructed other composers in our own histories and narratives. This is music and cultural history at its best."--James Hepokoski, Yale University