Papers by Naphtali Wagner
Boydell and Brewer eBooks, Dec 31, 2015
Music Theory Spectrum, Sep 1, 2003
Bach to Brahms presents current analytic views on the traditional tonal repertoire, with essays o... more Bach to Brahms presents current analytic views on the traditional tonal repertoire, with essays on works by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms. The fifteen essays, written by well-established scholars of this repertoire, are divided into three groups, two of which focus primarily on elements of musical design (formal, metric, and tonal organization) and voice leading at multiple levels of structure. The third group of essays focuses on musical motives from different perspectives. The result is a volume of integrated studies on the music of the common-practice period, a body of music that remains at the core of modern concert and classroom repertoire. Contributors: Eytan Agmon, David Beach, Charles Burkhart, L. Poundie Burstein, Yosef Goldenberg, Timothy L. Jackson, William Kinderman, Joel Lester, Boyd Pomeroy, John Rink, Frank Samarotto, Lauri Suurpaa, Naphtali Wagner, Eric Wen, Channan Willner. David Beach is professor emeritus and former dean of the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. Yosef Goldenberg teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where he also serves as head librarian.
A collection of essays co-edited by David Beach and Yosef Goldenberg, forthcoming in Eastman Stud... more A collection of essays co-edited by David Beach and Yosef Goldenberg, forthcoming in Eastman Studies in Music, University of Rochester Press, 15 June 2015
The fact that Natan Alterman's lyrics spawned Sasha Argov's best music did not prevent Ar... more The fact that Natan Alterman's lyrics spawned Sasha Argov's best music did not prevent Argov from complaining about the texts that Alterman gave him for his composition. His complaints imply that Alterman suffers, as it were, from a "rhythmic fixation," manifested in a single, oft-repeated pattern in his lyrics. In the discussion below, an attempt is made to identify the metric pattern to which Argov was referring, to see how the music copes with the metric uniformity of the text, and to determine whether, how, and why the music violates this uniformity and turns it into multiplicity. The discussion revolves around salient songs from the musical The King and the Cobbler (King Solomon and Shalmai the Shoemaker), almost all of them written in iambic tetrameter. The methodology is based on the following comparative procedure: First we look at the lyrics, ignoring the music, and determine its potential for regular and symmetrical composition. (In this case, as stated, ...
Schenkerian analysis brings two contradictory approaches to the concept of musical structure. The... more Schenkerian analysis brings two contradictory approaches to the concept of musical structure. The first focuses on developing the tools for unequivocal analytical statements. This approach, which is dominant today, treats musical syntax as a system in which the function of each note in the musical structure may be defined in just one way. It is reflected in the title and contents of the valuable article by Carl Schachter, "Either/Or."1 For example, Schachter presents three alternative Schenkerian interpretations of the beginning of a Chopin mazurka, and then points out that "one of the three readings is truer to the mazurka as a unique and individual work of art...." Schachter indicates that the function of ambiguity and multiple meanings "is more narrowly circumscribed than some analysts, perhaps misled by false analogies to language, seem to believe."2 The second approach, reflected in studies by Wallace Berry and William Benjamin, seeks to express th...
Journal of New Music Research, Jan 1, 2000
... music is still considered a pioneering act that can be regarded as a manifestation of the par... more ... music is still considered a pioneering act that can be regarded as a manifestation of the para-meter of texture (Cohen & Dubnov, 1997 ... States of concurrence and nonconcurrence may exist among various components: between bound-aries of learned and natural schemata (Fig ...
Music Perception, Jan 1, 1997
Wagner's leitmotifs were intentionally constructed as compact, discrete musical units ch... more Wagner's leitmotifs were intentionally constructed as compact, discrete musical units charged with extramusical meaning. Should they be con-sidered merely as arbitrary signifiers, whose signifieds are discovered only through the dramatic context of their appearance? The ...
Music Theory Spectrum, Jan 1, 1997
An earlier version of this paper was read at the conference "Mozart: 200 Years of Resear... more An earlier version of this paper was read at the conference "Mozart: 200 Years of Research and Analysis" at Hofstra University, February 1991. 'For example, in the The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), 72, Charles Rosen ...
Music Theory Spectrum, Jan 1, 2003
Theory and Practice, Jan 1, 1995
Israel Studies in Musicology, Jan 1, 1987
Beatlestudies, Jan 1, 2001
Music Analysis, Jan 1, 2006
Establishment of the opening tonic is one of the structural foundations of orthodox tonal practic... more Establishment of the opening tonic is one of the structural foundations of orthodox tonal practice regardless of period or genre. While this principle was almost always honoured, historically speaking, throughout the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century composers sometimes ...
Popular Music, Jan 1, 2004
A suppressed note is one that is consistently left out of the collection of pitch classes (differ... more A suppressed note is one that is consistently left out of the collection of pitch classes (different musical notes) in a musical piece and later appears with considerable emphasis. The Beatles frequently use the technique of suppressed notes, due to their tendency to compose ...
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Papers by Naphtali Wagner