Bruckner Symphony No 8

This book explores Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890) from several angles, offering an accessible guide to its musical design.

Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (1890), one of the last of the great Romantic symphonies, is a grandly complex masterpiece. This book explores this many-faceted work from several angles. It documents the complicated and often misunderstood history of the symphony's composition and revision and provides an accessible guide to its musical design. It demonstrates, by means of a study of well-known recordings, how performance styles have evolved in this century. It also revisits the conventional wisdom about the various versions and editions of the symphony and comes to some provocative new conclusions.

The Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) revised his symphonies many times during his lifetime, and editions are now available for most of those versions, with many distinguishing variants. This book describes in great detail how the listener can easily distinguish them, with many musical examples. There are also 300 associated sound files accessible through quick-recognition codes to assist the reader who is unfamiliar with musical notation.

A century after his death Anton Bruckner still remains one of the most complex and enigmatic creative personalities of the nineteenth century. A leading avant-garde figure of his generation, he was an accomplished performer and teacher in addition to being a great composer; few people in the history of western music can boast his level of achievement in all these areas combined. This book, a collection of essays written by an international group of scholars, offers diverse theoretical and musicological perspectives on Bruckner the composer-teacher-performer. Facets of his formidable theoretical training and his application of it as part of the compositional process are explored. A variety of analytical methodologies is used to examine the Second through to the Ninth Symphonies, the heart of the composer‘s mature repertoire. Finally, aspects of Bruckner‘s career as a teacher and performer, his complex personality, his influence and dissemination of his music are considered.

An Intermediate / AdvancedPiano Duet, composed by Anton Bruckner for 1 Piano, 4 Hands.