Hochschulschrift:
Los Angeles, Univ. of California, Diss., 2008
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
This dissertation explores how keyboard works in the 18th c. may have functioned as musical portraits of subjects of character pieces, of patrons, of performers, and of composers. I take a performance-based approach that brings in outside disciplines of art history, dance, literature, and philosophy to treat music as a sounding, kinesthetic, and visual phenomenon that conveyed meaning for and about its composers, performers and listeners. While early in the century, the portrayal of character at the keyboard depended upon a preexisting code of legible bodily signs, by the century's end the very conception of character shifted to center upon interior subjectivity. Musical aesthetics traced this shift with late century theories of expression and genius that viewed music as the ideal medium with which to depict the fluid, ever-changing, inner emotional world of interiority and personal character. A series of case studies permit me to trace the shifting definitions of character as they came to be represented at the keyboard. I write of the construction and deconstruction of visual constructs of character in the pièces de clavecin of François Couperin. I consider how music for Spanish royals by Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler functioned within the system of patronage to symbolically to represent patrons in a musical equivalent of the state portrait. I examine constructs of gender and female character in accompanied sonatas by and for the French amateur Madame Brillon de Jouy, and end with an analysis of musical self-portraiture and subjectivity in the free fantasias of C.P.E. Bach.