Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings

Ernst Kurth, Edited by Lee A. Rothfarb

This book provides a selection of annotated translations from Ernst Kurth’s three best-known publications: Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (1917), Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (1920), and Bruckner (1925). Kurth’s contemporaries considered these books to be pioneering studies in the music of J. S. Bach, Wagner and Bruckner. Professor Rothfarb’s extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural environment in which Kurth was writing, referring to aspects of the early twentieth-century cultural renewal movements and to intellectual developments of the day in phenomenology, aesthetics and psychology. By reading Kurth against the cultural-intellectual background provided in the essay and commentaries, today’s music historians and theorists can round out their picture of music theory in the early twentieth century.

Bibliographic Details

Contents

• Foreword Ian Bent
• Preface
• Notes on the translation
• Introduction
• Part I. Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (Foundations of linear counterpoint): 1. Polyphonic structure 2. Thematic and motivic processes 3. Polyphonic melody
• Part II. Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan (Romantic harmony and its crisis in Wagners Tristan): 4. Details of Romantic harmony 5. Broader dimensions of Romantic harmony
• Part III. Bruckner: 6. Bruckners form as undulatory phases
• 7. Details of Bruckners symphonic waves
• Appendix: complete tables of contents for Kurths Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan and Bruckner
• Select bibliography
• Index of musical examples
• General index.