Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities

Front Cover
Ashgate, 2000 - Music - 378 pages
The music of Shostakovich has been at the centre of interest of both the general public and dedicated scholars throughout the last twenty years. Most of the relevant literature, however, is of a biographical nature. The focus of this book is musical irony. It offers new methodologies for the semiotic analysis of music, and inspects the ironical messages in Shostakovich's music independently of political and biographical bias. Its approach to music is interdisciplinary, comparing musical devices with the artistic principles and literary analyses of satire, irony, parody and the grotesque. Each one of these is firstly inspected and defined as a separate subject, independent of music. The results of these inspections are subsequently applied to music, firstly music in general and then more specifically to the music of Shostakovich. The composer's cultural and historical milieux are taken into account and, where relevant, inspected and analysed separately before their application to the music.

Contents

philosophical background
33
Incongruities as indicators of irony
57
3
69
4
75
Satirizing techniques
97
Definitions of parody
141
7
147
Historical background
155
10
207
The grotesque at the beginning of the twentieth century
248
VI
283
Compound messages
317
Notes
320
Bibliography
339
313
363
Copyright

Techniques of parody
201

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About the author (2000)

A former student and colleague of Raymond Monelle, Esti Sheinberg's scholarship contributes to the developing field of music signification by combining music analysis and historical research with the semiotics of music.

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