Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory - Paperback

by Danuta Mirka (Editor)

Topics are musical signs developed and employed primarily during the long eighteenth century. Their significance relies on associations that are clearly recognizable to the listener with different genres, styles and types of music making. Topic theory, which is used to explain conventional subjects of musical composition in this period, is grounded in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism, while drawing also from music cognition and semiotics. The concept of topics was introduced into by Leonard Ratner in the 1980s to account for cross-references between eighteenth-century styles and genres. As the invention of a twentieth-century academic, topic theory as a field is comparatively new, and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory provides a much-needed reconstruction of the field's aesthetic underpinnings.

Author Biography

Danuta Mirka is Reader in Music at the University of Southampton. She is the co-editor, with Kofi Agawu, of Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music. Her books include The Sonoristic Structuralism of Krzysztof Penderecki and Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787-1791, which won the 2011 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory.