Tracing Beethoven Through the Ten Sonatas for Piano and Violin

Examination of Beethoven’s ten sonatas for piano and violin as a single arc, to uncover linkages between the individual sonatas and observe their stylistic evolution as a set, benefits from placing these works also in relation to the wider realm of Beethoven’s chamber music as a whole. During the years in which his sonatas for piano and violin were written, Beethoven often produced multiple works simultaneously. In fact, the first nine sonatas for piano and violin were written within a mere five-year span (1798 – 1803.) After a gap of nine years, Beethoven completed his tenth and final sonata, marking the end of his “Middle Period.” Because of this distribution, it is important to consider each of these sonatas not only as an interdependent set, but also in relation to the whole of Beethoven’s output for small ensemble. Beethoven wrote the last of his piano and violin sonatas in 1812, with a decade and a half of innovation still ahead of him. This provokes one to look beyond these sonatas to discover the final incarnation of the ideas introduced in these works. In particular, the key creative turning points within the ten sonatas for piano and violin become strikingly apparent when compared to Beethoven’s string quartets, which dramatically showcase Beethoven’s evolution in sixteen works distributed more or less evenly across his career. From the perspective of a string quartet player, studying the ten sonatas for piano and violin provides an opportunity to note similarities between the genres. This paper argues that examining the ten sonatas from a viewpoint primarily informed by Beethoven’s string quartets yields a more thorough understanding of the sonatas themselves and a broader conception of the vast network of interrelationships that produce Beethoven’s definitive voice. The body of this paper contains a full exploration of each of the ten sonatas for piano and violin, highlighting key musical, historical, and theoretical elements. Each of the sonatas is then put not only in context of the set of ten, but is contrasted with Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets, identifying unifying motives, techniques, and structural principles that recur across both bodies of work.

Selected Violin Concertos: In Search of a Missing Link

My dissertation presented seven violin concertos in three recital programs. Three of these concertos are acknowledged masterpieces performed in established concert venues throughout the world. They are the concertos of Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. The other four are less standard and are composed by Viotti, Kreutzer, Rode and Spohr. These less standard concertos were popular during their time yet they seem not to have stood the test of time. A curriculum devoted exclusively to the standard concertos creates problems for the young violinist. The Mozart violin concertos are often the first standard concertos that the young violin student encounters. They are considered to be the least technically demanding of the standard concertos. The next most advanced standard concertos that the student will usually encounter are Bruch’s G minor concerto, Wieniawski’s D minor concerto and Barber’s concerto. The trouble is that the work on Mozart concertos does not adequately prepare a student for the next most advanced standard concerto. There is a discontinuous leap in the progression of technical difficulty between the Mozart concertos and the next most advanced concertos. Likewise the standard concerto repertoire provides no smooth historical or stylistic progression between the Mozart concertos and the next most advanced concertos. If the young violinist is limited to the standard repertoire then she has no smooth progression either technical, historical or stylistic. I seek to demonstrate that, by adding concertos of Spohr, Viotti, Kreutzer, and Rode to the standard violin curriculum, one could remedy this problem. The first and third recitals were performed in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall and the second recital in the School of Music’s Smith Lecture Hall, both at the University of Maryland. All three recitals can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).

Beethoven's Violinists: The Influence of Clement, Viotti, and the French School on Beethoven's Violin Compositions

Over the course of his career, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) admired and befriended many violin virtuosos. In addition to being renowned performers, many of these virtuosos were prolific composers in their own right. Through their own compositions, interpretive style and new technical contributions, they inspired some of Beethoven’s most beloved violin works. This dissertation places a selection of Beethoven’s violin compositions in historical and stylistic context through an examination of related compositions by Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), Pierre Rode (1774–1830) and Franz Clement (1780–1842). The works of these violin virtuosos have been presented along with those of Beethoven in a three-part recital series designed to reveal the compositional, technical and artistic influences of each virtuoso. Viotti’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in E major and Rode’s Violin Concerto No. 10 in B minor serve as examples from the French violin concerto genre, and demonstrate compositional and stylistic idioms that affected Beethoven’s own compositions. Through their official dedications, Beethoven’s last two violin sonatas, the Op. 47, or Kreutzer, in A major, dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer, and Op. 96 in G major, dedicated to Pierre Rode, show the composer’s reverence for these great artistic personalities. Beethoven originally dedicated his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, to Franz Clement. This work displays striking similarities to Clement’s own Violin Concerto in D major, which suggests that the two men had a close working relationship and great respect for one another. The first recital was performed in Ulrich Recital Hall; the second and third recitals were performed in Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the University of Maryland. All three performances were collaborations with pianist, Hsiang-Ling Hsiao. A Recording of the first program can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM). Recordings of the second and third recitals can be accessed at the University of Maryland Hornbake Library.

Graduate Violin Recital

Sonata for Solo Violin in G-minor, J. S. Bach (1685-1750) Adagio Fuga Siciliana Presto Sonata for Violin and Piano in G-major, L. Beethoven (1770-1827) Allegro assai Tempo di Menuetto Allegro vivace Sonata for Violin and Piano in A-major, G. Faure (1845-1924) Allegro molto Andante Allegro vivo Allegro quasi presto Jennifer Snyder, piano

Cage & Partch with Luke Fitzpatrick Adapted Viola, Intoning Voice and Violin December 2, 2016

Concert Program

Understanding public response to a congestion charge : a random-effects ordered logit approach

Public acceptance is consistently listed as having an enormous impact on the implementation and success of a congestion charge scheme. This paper investigates public acceptance of such a scheme in Australia. Surveys were conducted in Brisbane and Melbourne, the two fastest growing Australian cities. Using an ordered logit modeling approach, the survey data including stated preferences were analyzed to pinpoint the important factors influencing people’s attitudes to a congestion charge and, in turn, to their transport mode choices. To accommodate the nature of, and to account for the resulting heterogeneity of the panel data, random effects were considered in the models. As expected, this study found that the amount of the congestion charge and the financial benefits of implementing it have a significant influence on respondents’ support for the charge and on the likelihood of their taking a bus to city areas. However, respondents’ current primary transport mode for travelling to the city areas has a more pronounced impact. Meanwhile, respondents’ perceptions of the congestion charge’s role in protecting the environment by reducing vehicle emissions, and of the extent to which the charge would mean that they travelled less frequently to the city for shopping or entertainment, also have a significant impact on their level of support for its implementation. We also found and explained notable differences across two cities. Finally, findings from this study have been fully discussed in relation to the literature.

The Goldbergs

The puzzle depicts five people in a domestic interior. A woman leans towards a window. The speech bubble above her head reads "Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Bloom!". A man holding a newspaper sits in a recliner. An older, bald-headed man stands, gesturing. A boy plays the violin at right, accompanied by a girl at the piano. The characters are identified in the border below: Mollie, Jake, David, Sammy, and Rosie.

Staubkorn im Sandsturm.

Fate of the Jewish physician Karl Goldberg, novel written in 1944. Novel is only partially autobiographical.

STUDENT'S-t MIXTURE MODEL BASED MULTI-INSTRUMENT RECOGNITION IN POLYPHONIC MUSIC

We address the problem of multi-instrument recognition in polyphonic music signals. Individual instruments are modeled within a stochastic framework using Student's-t Mixture Models (tMMs). We impose a mixture of these instrument models on the polyphonic signal model. No a priori knowledge is assumed about the number of instruments in the polyphony. The mixture weights are estimated in a latent variable framework from the polyphonic data using an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, derived for the proposed approach. The weights are shown to indicate instrument activity. The output of the algorithm is an Instrument Activity Graph (IAG), using which, it is possible to find out the instruments that are active at a given time. An average F-ratio of 0 : 7 5 is obtained for polyphonies containing 2-5 instruments, on a experimental test set of 8 instruments: clarinet, flute, guitar, harp, mandolin, piano, trombone and violin.

Cidadania e autoestima com crianças e jovens da Orquestra de Violinos do Centro Cultural Cartola

Esta pesquisa parte da relação música/projeto social para estudar de que forma os integrantes da Orquestra de Violinos Cartola-Petrobras, do Centro Cultural Cartola, no Rio de Janeiro, tiveram reforçada a autoestima pelo aprendizado de uma nova linguagem a musical e pelo convívio com os professores e com os demais companheiros músicos. Nesse percurso, foram analisadas as dificuldades de se morar em uma favela carioca, dentre elas o preconceito, seja do ponto de vista geográfico, seja do ponto de vista social, uma vez que a maioria dos componentes da Orquestra mora na Mangueira. O ponto de partida foi a leitura de teóricos como Axel Honneth, George Yúdice, Stuart Hall e a contribuição de outros estudiosos da área sociocultural, que comparecem para dar suporte à argumentação. Num segundo momento, foi desenvolvido o trabalho de campo, com o recolhimento dos dados colhidos em entrevistas com os atores sociais. O binômio reconhecimento social/solidariedade implica outro elemento aqui também abordado: o desenvolvimento da cidadania. Diante de tal cenário, é possível observar a possibilidade de imprimirem-se mudanças no contexto onde a realidade se configura, ou seja, qual o lugar que o sujeito ocupa antes e depois de ser instaurado o processo de apropriação do conhecimento e como as mudanças que se operam nele se estendem ao ambiente em derredor, incluindo a família.