Modernist Movements: Listening for Topics in Schoenberg and Stravinsky

Topic theory examines the lexicon of conventions that emerged in the late eighteenth century through which composers evoked dances, marches, hunting, the pastoral, and the supernatural. While scholars have explored ad hoc applications of the theory in later repertories, author Johanna Frymoyer begins with fundamental methodological questions of if, why, and how analysts ought to apply topic theory--a method tailored to eighteenth-century historical and aesthetic contingencies--to modernist ...