Beethoven after NapoleonPolitical Romanticism in the Late Works

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music

“…A further complication is introduced by incorporating visual culture -and the syntactic-semantic networks it draws upon -as a factor affecting verbal-conceptual memes and musemes. More often than not, influences upon music from the wider culture appear to inhere largely in quite broad-brush aspects, such as the oft-noted connections between imperial/militaristic politics and musical swagger (Rumph, 2004), that are inherently difficult to cross-map with a meaningful level of granularity. In general, music often tends to be seen as an epiphenomenon, not a driver, of culture: in the previous example, ceremonial music is primarily understood to reflect and glorify an extant swagger, even though a feedback loop might be assumed to have operated, whereby the music served further to embolden the swaggerers.…”

Pagine di Guerra: imaginários musicais de 1914‑1918

“…Se as Guerras Napoleónicas, nas obras de Beethoven (Rumph, 2004) e de Tchaikovsky, por exemplo, encontraram uma tradução musical a um tempo tributária do nacionalismo e de contornos descritivistas, já a Primeira Guerra Mundial, conflito de origens mais complexas e de consequências humanas assaz duradouras, deu corpo a uma série de composições menos triunfalistas, de caráter elegíaco, que refletiram o ilusório jogo de espelhos da contenda que muitos julgariam terminada por alturas do Natal de 1914, ou da "guerra para acabar com a guerra", segundo as famosas palavras de H. G. Wells. Na verdade, um tanto obscurecida pelas "sinfo- (Beidler, 2012).…”