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Reinventing Tradition: Brahms, Progress, and Basso Ostinato

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2015, Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, Music History.
In 1919, T. S. Eliot published "Tradition and the Individual Talent," a seminal essay in the development of early twentieth-century modernism. Eliot posited that a good poet must posses an understanding of history and of his predecessors, and therefore see historical tradition as vital to their craft. Instead of rejecting tradition as a crutch for unoriginality, Eliot advocated the embrace of tradition. Eliot's model of poetic tradition and influence bears many similarities to the work of Johannes Brahms, who frequently alluded to the past throughout his oeuvre. Although deemed "conservative" by many of his contemporaries, Brahms incorporated elements of tradition into his music through allusions to specific composers, genres, styles, and techniques. Although these very traits earned him the label "conservative," several authors have since revised this notion of Brahms. In his famous essay "Brahms the Progressive," Arnold Schoenberg identified certain aspects of Brahms's music that were progressive rather than traditional. In the same vein, scholars such as Michael Musgrave, Kevin Korsyn, and others have suggested that Brahms's "old-fashioned" leanings mark him as a progressive, or even an early modernist. Taking Eliot's ideal poet as a model, I examine two works by Brahms that utilize a specific compositional device distinctively lifted from earlier music: basso ostinato. The second movement of String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Opus 18 (1860) and the Variations on a Theme of Haydn for Orchestra, Opus 56a (1873) both utilize basso ostinato, through a hybrid chaconne and a passacaglia, respectively. These two pieces look not only look backward, but also forward, and display progressive qualities, such as those enumerated by Schoenberg. Through a retroactive association with Eliot's paradigm of tradition, Brahms's works that incorporate basso ostinato can be seen as examples of his innovation.
Eftychia Papanikolaou (Advisor)
Arne Spohr (Committee Member)
83 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hines, J. (2015). Reinventing Tradition: Brahms, Progress, and Basso Ostinato [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1399942904

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hines, Jane. Reinventing Tradition: Brahms, Progress, and Basso Ostinato. 2015. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1399942904.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hines, Jane. "Reinventing Tradition: Brahms, Progress, and Basso Ostinato." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1399942904

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)