Le 1er juillet 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Séance - Theory and Performance of 19th-Century Music
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Stephan Lewandowski
When the pianist, composer and piano teacher Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849) published his Traité d’harmonie du pianiste at the end of his life, both in a French and in a German version, the work had to find its place on a market being overflooded with treatises on harmony and music theory, in general. The title of Kalkbrenner’s work, however, is misleading: Neither does the author provide a book dealing with lectures in harmony, nor does he concentrate on the topic modulation, as the subtitle of the French version connotes. Instead of, Kalkbrenners purpose is to close a gap between the harmony teaching tradition of his time, which he considers as being abstract, and musical praxis. Thus, the treatise focuses on improvisation as well as on the tradition of “preluding”. It consists of many musical examples given mainly by the author himself, being based on marches harmoniques (harmonische Gänge) that are to be found in numerous writings on harmony of the time.
In my talk I wish to compare some of Kalkbrenner’s musical examples respective marches given in this treatise on harmony with some passages taken from his 24 Préludes, op. 88. These short works seem to represent an interesting stage between the phase of sketch-like pre-composition and a fully worked out musical work. For this reason, the Préludes show some insight to how a piece of music is made in Kalkbrenner’s thinking.
