Instructor: Dr.

Sumner-Lott
Student: Jonatas Santos
Course: Intro to Graduate Studies

Summary & Response to 3 Scholarly Sources

Brahms and His World by Walter Frisch and Kevin C. Karnes

This book consists of four parts. In Part I, essays explore different aspects of
Brahms's relationship to his world. The topics include time, memory, and concert life in
Brahms's Vienna; Brahms's complex personality, Brahms and Clara Schumannx; Brahms
and the New German School; Brahms's pianos; and Brahmsian influences on his
generation. Part II presents commentaries on Brahms's music including excerpts from the
earliest works by Brahms, analyses of the symphonies, choirs and songs; and an analysis
of Joseph Joachim's Hungarian Concerto. Part III offers tons of excerpts from journals
about Brahms written by current scholars who were prominent musical figures. Part IV
brings a dedication chapter prepared by Walter Frisch.
In Part II, this book provides a broad concept and structural analyze on Brahms’s
four symphonies. I found interesting how Hermann Kretzschmar exemplify all aspects of
Brahms’s symphonic writings. Obviously, the most important part in this chapter to my
project is the second symphony analyze. Although a concise one, his analyze provides
not just a technical essay but also an imaginative and synesthetic approach.
The chapter that also grabbed my attention was the called: “Five early works”.
This chapter present us Brahms’ musical footprints before composing his second
symphony. It is important source to take informations on his early styles and influences.

The Thematic Process in Music by Rudolph Reti

Motivic Analysis of Brahms’s second symphony was written by Rudolph Réti in

his book The Thematic Process in Music (1978). This book consists of a methodological
procedure that considers the Thematic Structure as the most essential process of musical
composition. According to Reti, the unity of the piece occurs from the linear development
and transformations of small cells presented at the beginning of the compositions, the so-
called Motives. The goal of Retti, therefore, is to give a clear comprehension on how
themes are constructed.
In my opinion, the limitation of this procedure is related to macro-structural
issues: the author in his book describes so many possibilities of motivic transformations
and developments that it ends up being quite difficult to establish principles of formal
structure, impairing the understanding of intermediate aspects, or the work as a whole.

Brahms and the Principle of Destabilised Beginnings by Ryan McClelland

According to Dr. Mcclelland, despite the high number of academic works on the
motivic process in Brahms' instrumental music, few studies emphasize global thematic
processes that involve thematic transformations with a destabilized beginning. In this
article, the author lists the destabilized beginning in works by Brahms in comparison to
works from the early 19th century. The article analyzes several pieces with destabilized
beginnings in order to demonstrate the techniques and strategies used by Brahms to
destabilize the tone and rhythm/metrics of the music within a thematic context.
The destabilization of the tonal structure in Brahms includes several typical 19th
century compositional techniques that are interrelated. In this article, the author
thoroughly demonstrates six techniques that have been used extensively in Brahms music.
The techniques that are most important to my research project are about chromaticism
and the expanded use of tonality as these two points clearly elucidate how Brahms tends
to vary the themes of his works.

Observation:

Dr. Sumner-lott, I’d like to include this article below. As you didn’t answer my
email yet about my refined topic research, I added and summarize this article
concerning Brahms’s religion.
There are also two more books that I should include here. “Brahms: the four
symphonies” and “Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation”, both written by
Walter Frisch. I read the reviews of those books provided on JSTOR. However, as I am
still in Brazil, I am not able to get a paper book on GSU library or purchase them since
those books here in Brazil are very, very expensive.

Brahms and his religion by Ronald Knox

This article deals with the religious perspective in Brahms' vocal music.
According to the author, scholars, especially Anglo-Americans, have for some time
expressed unanimous opinions: a supposedly humanist-cultural religiosity of the
musician and his consequent agnosticism in putting biblical words in his music. The
assumptions of such unanimity, however, have been contested and widely discussed by
Ronald Knox.
This article focuses on compositions such as Ein deutsches Requiem op. 45,
Rhapsodie op. 53, op. Schicksalslied. 54, the triumph op. 55, Nänie op. 82, Gesang der
Parzen op. 89, the motto "Warum ist das Licht gegeben" op. 74/2, and Vier ernste
Gesänge op. 121 to provide an accurate assessment of how the characteristics of liberal
Protestantism professed by Brahms were reflected in his textual choices and musical
tendencies. Dr. Knox describes Brahms’s religion and its relation to his music through a
careful re-reading of testimonies contained in stories, anecdotes, correspondence, travel
reports and readings.