Bruckners Eighth Symphony A Listenerguided Analysis 1st Edition David B Greene by David B. Greene 9781495503221, 1495503224 instant download after payment.

David Greene's careful, close, and imaginative description of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor makes for a rich examination of subjectivity in the musical experience of the individual listener. Few composers are heard more
differently among concertgoers; while for some, Bruckner stands with Mahler as the last of the great romantic symphonists, for others his music is "inlaid with gold and weighted with lead." Some listeners have had something akin to an epiphany; others have found the experience tedious. Thomas Beecham said of Bruckner's Seventh, "In the first movement alone, I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages." Like much music of the late nineteenth century, Bruckner's Eighth offers an experience of extremes. Listeners of a more Classical, moderate persuasion would find its extremes, perhaps, off-putting, exaggerated, and overblown. David Greene and other critics have heard in this behemoth the deepest abyss and darkest despair expressible t'lrough music, as well as the most celestial light and heavenly height.
At a social gathering of colleagues some time ago, someone asked me, rather out of the blue, what I thought of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony. Without hesitating, I answered, "It's the greatest symphony ever written." I had come to this conclusion fifty years before as a high school orchestral cellist-in-training. It indeed has a great ceHo part, its pallet suffuse with the richness of my instrument. But as my life took other turns, I found in this great work at several of the more difficult turns a great consolation and hope. At any rate, 1 was delighted that my colleague didn't argue. He may have been as surprised by my answer as I was by his question.
Yet both those who, like me, find Bruckner's symphonies enthralling and those who don't may well be hearing the same tonal centers, chromatic progressions, repeated motivic ceils that musicologists describe in their analysis of the "musical object."