Maciej Gołąb Bücher

This book offers a fresh discussion of the methodology of music historiography. So far historiographical methodology has always depended on other fields within humanities (especially on history) to a degree where it moved the focus of its thought away from the musical work’s structure and away from the musical work itself. Musical Modernism in the Twentieth Century looks at musical structures in its cultural context, using different methodological models for the interpretation of the subsequent phases of the twentieth-century musical modernism.

The studies collected in this book fall into four chief thematic areas of research on Fryderyk Chopin’s life, stylistic changes, creative output, and musical reception. The first one is devoted to the origins of the composer’s artistic formation in the context of his connections with the Main School of Music at the Royal University of Warsaw. The second thematic area is tied to the problem of Chopin’s musical language and transformation of his individual style. The third group of studies concentrates on issues in Chopin’s musical aesthetics, while the fourth and final one is devoted to the questions of composer’s reception in the 19th-century musical culture in light of the practice of musical transcriptions at the time.

Musical Work Analysis is a holistic approach to the cognitive theory of the musical work. The book develops some of Roman Ingarden’s concepts on the epistemology of an actually existing work of music. The author outlines an epistemological theory of the musical work by discussing the role of musical analysis in modern musicology, defining sources and objects of epistemological activity, formulating a systematization of analytical terms, issues and methods, both normative and descriptive, and addressing the relation between analysis and interpretation of a musical work. The book was published in Polish language in edition of the Foundation for Polish Science (Wrocław University Press, Wrocław 2003) and awarded by the Polish Ministry of National Education (2004).