Although Beethoven's choice of topics in his Missa Solemnis has been largely glossed over, it plays an important role in the dramatic construction and symbolic meaning of the Benedictus. The movement is governed by a pastoral idiom, but the connotative meaning of this idiom is transformed through the appearance of other topics. Its dramatic introduction and combination of "procession" music, canonic process, and cadenza-like gestures complicate its over-arching topic and create a newly heterogeneous pastoral form. Beethoven's topic reveals a poetic conceit that is at once religious, secular, and humanist. The painter Caspar David Friedrich was also engaged by a Kantian epistemological framework. The divine imagery in his landscapes is reinterpreted by its narrative and dramatic context. In Beethoven's Benedictus, the solo violin is the custodian of the pastoral imagination. Likewise, painterly recession from darkness to lightness is mediated by Friedrich's subjects, whose presence indicates both distance and self-referential absorption in the natural.If we reflect on the distance between the fixed stars and our earth, we shall have new cause to admire the greatness of creation. 1 -Christopher Christian Sturm (1740-86) Midway through the rigorous physicality of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, the Benedictus is set into relief not only because of the serenity of its theme but also because of the way in which this theme is introduced-by way of a stratospheric entry of a solo violin and two flutes, suggesting the 1 Maynard Solomon remarks that Beethoven heavily marked and annotated his own copy of Sturm's book.

One of the most frequently performed contemporary composers, Arvo Pärt has become a phenomenon whose unusual reach is felt well beyond the concert hall. This ground-breaking collection of essays investigates both the causes and the effects of this success. Beyond the rhetoric of 'holy minimalism' that has accompanied the composer's reception since the mid-1980s, each chapter takes a fresh approach toward understanding how Pärt's music has occupied social landscapes. The result is a dynamic conversation among filmgoers (who explore issues of empathy and resemblance), concertgoers (commerce and art), listeners (embodiment, healing and the role of technology), activists (legacies of resistance) and performers (performance practice). Collectively, these studies offer a bold and thoughtful engagement with Pärt as a major cultural figure and reflect on the unprecedented impact of his music.

The opening of Mahler's ““Der Abschied”” from Das Lied von der Erde demonstrates a special set of musical conditions that include spare textures, a wide disposition of instrumental forces, and the effect of temporal suspension. This transparency allows the process of individuation and exchange between musical elements to come to the fore, especially in relation to timbre. Through this passage Mahler highlights voices that work in synthesis with those that are juxtaposed. The first half of the study explores how this music is defined spatially through this process. It then proposes that this space is historically meaningful because Mahler's construction of musical space is analogous to the visual tensions in the landscape works of his artistic contemporaries Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. In both musical and visual context, these tensions reflect the diversity of the Viennese Moderne through their ephemeral and laconic qualities. Mahler's compositional tendency to ““suspend”” time and flatten the sonic plane gave his critics fodder for an ideological argument that involved ornamentation versus organic development, since his methods reflected ambiguously on the nineteenthcentury tradition of teleologically based symphonic forms. ““Abschied”” derived its relevancy from neither static surface nor motivic development but by its capacity to suggest unique spatial relationships. The movement initiates a timbrally and rhythmically nuanced recitative, in the form of subtle decays and articulated renewals. Like Klimt's superimposed visual planes, which create a synthetic relationship between figure and ground, Mahler's music suggests incremental distances between subjects. The economy of his music relates also to Schiele's laconic subjects. In Mahler's landscapes, both types of experiments coexist.

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Compositions by Arvo Pärt have been frequently described as alluding to medieval compositional practices and sound. Miserere (1989, revised 1992)—a work for soloists, chorus, and instrumental ensemble that sets Psalm 50/51 and the thirteenth-century Dies irae hymn—makes a useful case study of his engagement with medievalism, particularly its aesthetic, theological, and reception-based dimensions. Over a period of three decades, Miserere has been subject to numerous interpretations and has been absorbed into the labor of culture and commerce. This study considers three aspects of its story: first, how Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique, which emphasizes creative rebirth through early music, relates to the composition of Miserere; second, how the relationship of his music to the medieval has been immortalized in recording and debated by the academy; and finally, how his music has been popularly received and drawn into other media, including its evocations of virtual liturgy. This complex crossroad—what I later term “third-space medievalism”—can be characterized as a tension between the ontologies of tintinnabuli and its claims regarding the authority of early music; the alignment of Pärt’s music with medieval music praxis; the commercial immortalization of Pärt as both belonging to a premodern past and anticipating the postmodern future; the labor of some commentators to reconcile Pärt between modernism and postmodernism; the utility of Pärt’s music in the evocation of asynchrony in the moving image; and finally the positioning of Pärt’s music as a text encoded with images from a pre-Enlightenment world.