Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation

Musical Meaning in Beethoven offers a fresh approach to the interpretation and explanation of musical expressive meaning. Beginning with a provocative analysis of the slow movement from Beethoven's Hammerklavier piano sonata, the investigation examines the role of markedness, Classical topics, expressive genres, and musical tropes in fostering expressive interpretation at all levels of structure. Along the way, close readings of movements from Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets highlight less-obvious expressive meanings and explain how more-familiar piano meanings are consistently cued from one work to the next. The model of musical meaning that Robert S. Hatten puts forth is grounded in the semiotic contributions of Charles Sanders Peirce, Umberto Eco, and Michael Shapiro; and in the theoretical and historical contributions of Leonard B. Meyer, Charles Rosen, and Leonard Ratner. In addition, the latest musicological scholarship is brought to bear on a stylistic approach of considerable interpretive depth. Radically departing from both the nineteenth-century Formalist aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick and Formalist theories underlying tonal analysis in the twentieth century, the author argues that expressive meaning is not extramusical but fundamental to the reconstruction of compositional practice and stylistic understanding, even for the ""absolute"" works of Beethoven.