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Princeton University Press

Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition
Charles Dill

One of the foremost composers of the French Baroque operatic tradition, Rameau is often cited for his struggle to steer lyric tragedy away from its strict Lullian form, inspired by spoken tragedy, and toward a more expressive musical style. In this fresh exploration of Rameau's compositional aesthetic, Charles Dill depicts a much more complicated figure: one obsessed with tradition, music theory, his own creative instincts, and the public's expectations of his music. Dill examines the ways Rameau mediated among these often competing values and how he interacted with his critics and with the public. The result is a sophisticated rethinking of Rameau as a musical innovator.

In his compositions, Rameau tried to highlight music's potential for dramatic meanings. But his listeners, who understood lyric tragedy to be a poetic rather than musical genre, were generally frustrated by these attempts. In fact, some described Rameau's music as monstrous--using an image of deformity to represent the failure of reason and communication. Dill shows how Rameau answered his critics with rational, theoretical arguments about the role of music in lyric tragedy. At the same time, however, the composer sought to placate his audiences by substantially revising his musical texts in later performances, sometimes abandoning his most creative ideas.

Monstrous Opera illuminates the complexity of Rameau's vision, revealing not only the tensions within the music but also the conflicting desires that drove the man--himself caricatured by his contemporaries as a monster.

Charles Dill is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Princeton Studies in Opera: Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, Editors

JUNE 240 pages
22 music examples 6 x 9
0-691-04443-0 Cloth
$39.95S

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Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians
Kenneth Levy

A world-renowned scholar of plainchant, Kenneth Levy has spent a portion of his career investigating the nature and ramifications of this repertory's shift from an oral tradition to the written versions dating to the tenth century. In Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, which represents the culmination of his research, Levy seeks to change long-held perceptions about ceratin crucial stages of the evolution and dissemination of the old corpus of plainchant--most notably the assumption that such a large and complex repertory could have become and remained fixed for over a century while still an oral tradition. Levy protrays the promulgation of an authoritative body of plainchant during the reign of Charlemagne by clearly differentiating between actual evidence, hypotheses, and received ideas.

How many traditions of oral chant existed before the tenth century? Among the variations noted in written chant, can one point to a single version as being older or more authentic than the others? What precursors might there have been to the notational system used in all the surviving manuscripts, where the notational system seems fully formed and mature? In answering questions that have long vexed scholars of Gregorian chant's early history, Levy offers fresh explanations of such topics as the origin of Latin neumes, the shifting relationships between memory and early notations, and the puzzling differences among the first surviving neume-species from the tenth century, which have until now impeded a critical restoration of the Carolingian musical forms.

Kenneth Levy is a Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is well known for his work in medieval music, particularly Byzantine and Latin plainchant. He is the author of Music: A Listener's Introduction.

MARCH 296 pages
28 halftones 36 line illus.
2 tables 6 x 9
0-691-01733-6 Cloth
$49.50S

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The Music Theory of Godfrey Winham
Leslie David Blasius

This book serves as an introduction to the work of Godfrey Winham, an influential figure in American music theory circles in the 1960s. Little published in his lifetime, Winham left behind, at his premature death in 1974, a massive collection of notes: correspondence, unfinished articles, sketches for books, etc. These notes were transcribed and deposited in the Special Collections of Firestone Library at Princeton University. They cover a fascinating range of subjects: exercises in analytical logic, thoughts on the construction of a formally consistent music theory, studies of particular pieces, and an epistemological reconception of Schenker's analysis.

In The Music Theory of Godfrey Winham, Leslie David Blasius attempts to synthesize the various aspects of the theorist's thinking into a single coherent, if unfinished, endeavor. Blasius concentrates in particular on Winham's attempts to define formally the basic terms of music theory, his axiomatic phenomenology of pitch and harmonic relations, his tentative steps towards an axiomatic phenomenology of rhythm, and his fresh consideration of the reciprocal relationship between theory and analysis. In so doing, Blasius gives a clear picture of the materials in the archives, particularly when they exhibit Winham's multiple attempts to come to terms with a specific problem. The volume includes a set of complete excerpts of materials cited in Blasius's text and an index for the entire collection.

Leslie David Blasius is currently Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Schenker's Argument and the Claims of Music Theory.

A publication of the Department of Music, Princeton University
208 pages
6 x 9
0-691-01227-X Cloth $35.00 US L27.50 UK and Europe

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