Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Leonard Meyer proposes a theory of style and style change that relates the choices made by composers to the constraints of psychology, cultural context, and musical traditions. He explores why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others.

Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time.

"A monumental work. . . . Most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this interaction."- Choice

"Probes the foundations of musical research precisely at the joints where theory and history fold into one another."-Kevin Korsyn, Journal of American Musicological Society

"A remarkably rich and multifaceted, yet unified argument. . . . No one else could have brought off this immense project with anything like Meyer's command."-Robert P. Morgan, Music Perception

"Anyone who attempts to deal with Romanticism in scholarly depth must bring to the task not only musical and historical expertise but unquenchable optimism. Because Leonard B. Meyer has those qualities in abundance, he has been able to offer fresh insight into the Romantic concept."-Donal Henahan, New York Times

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface Pt
• I Theory
• 1 Toward a Theory of Style
• 2 Style Analysis Pt
• II History, Innovation, and Choice
• 3 Thoughts Ahout History
• 4 Innovation - Reasons and Sources
• 5 Choice and Replication Pt
• III Music and Ideology: A Sketch-History of Nineteenth-Century Music
• 6 Romanticism - The Ideology of Elite Egalitarians
• 7 Convention Disguised - Nature Affirmed
• 8 Syntax, Form, and Unity Epilogue: The Persistence of Romanticism
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index
• Index of Musical Examples

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Meyer has had a very strong impact on analytical and aesthetic thinking about classical music. His first book, Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), linked a psychological theory of perception to musical analysis in a penetrating study that continues to be his best-known to this day. Music, the Arts and Ideas (Ch, Jul'68), deals with music in 20th-century culture and has a core chapter, "Varieties of Style Change." A much more extensive study on style followed--Explaining Music (1973). All of these issues are now further developed in a book that, like its predecessors, is a monumental work and will hold the interest of the intellectual musical world for some time. In the first of three parts, Meyer develops a theory of musical style based on music's constraining rather than its innovative features. These constraints, in turn, are governed by the culture, indeed the very ideology of the time. Thus, replication rather than innovation is a guideline to studying musical style, and the choices that composers make within a context of constraint determine their individuality. Part 2 examines various historical premises that support Meyer's theory, and, in Part 3, the author offers a "sketch-history" of 19th-century music (191 pp.!) in order to show how style change "might be explained rather than merely described" (italics added). Meyer is quite distinctive in this effort: most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this interaction. Libraries at all levels. -W. K. Kearns, University of Colorado at Boulder