Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Public and Private Performance , edited by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, began as a conference held at the Royal College of Music, London, in 2011. The book draws together various musicological strands that in recent years have preoccupied scholars of nineteenth-century music. More specifically, it concerns domestic music-making, Brahms in the home, social, cultural, and hermeneutic contexts for Brahms’s smaller forms, and the question of the arrangement of larger works for smaller forces. Although these may sound like familiar themes to Brahms scholars, Hamilton and Loges have not only shaped these various strands into a coherent whole that is engaging and compelling, but they have also achieved that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-worn subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again. The book is not arranged into parts or sections. The editors have instead allowed the contributions to follow on from one another without imposing categories. Readers will find it equally satisfying to jump in at any given essay or to read all of the contributions in sequence. With this in mind, I borrow (and slightly amend) the imagery that Julian Johnson recently employed to describe the contents of his latest book, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (New York and Oxford, 2014): the result of Hamilton and Loges’s volume is less a progression of ideas to be read from left to right or as some sequence of themes, ‘and rather more like the map of the London underground or the New York subway. Any of its multiple lines can be traversed in [various] directions; all of its lines intersect with several others, producing interchanges from one to the other; [and] all the stations co-exist’ (p. 11). This is a rich and enriching volume that addresses a myriad of issues relating to private and public performances and the performance contexts of the works of Brahms and his contemporaries.

Active listening · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Rhetoric · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Visual arts · Communication · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy