Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound

Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound presents the composer as an innovator inspired not only by past musical traditions but also by a contemporary interest in experimentalism. In the twentieth-century, Busoni wrote pieces where sound radiates from different directions, created montage formal structures, and freely used all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale without avoiding consonances. This book reveals how he also applied his understanding of tangiblearchitectural spaces, buildings, and floor plans to his music, reconciling the spatial and temporal divide in music through an interdisciplinary approach. His innovation prompted and inspired new trends in pitch organization, the spatialization of sound, and the expansion of formal structures. Transcendingphysical boundaries of compositional innovation, Busoni also engaged in a rich exchange of ideas with contemporary architects and artists. Through a broad analysis of Busoni's compositional activities, musicologist Erinn E. Knyt brings Busoni's music into dialogue with more recent accounts of modernism in music that move beyond elitist esotericism and notions of rupture with the past. In addition, she facilitates a discourse between Busoni and other twentieth-century artists and explores how Busoni's spatialized architectural music left a lasting imprint on future generations of musicians and early film pioneers.

Erinn E. Knyt, currently the most active Busoni scholar, continues her series of detailed examinations of his contribution to music in the first quarter of the twentieth century, here on an extended scale. Supported as in former publications by careful archival work, she shows how his lifelong fascination with architecture and related concepts permeated many aspects of his original works and arrangements. Her conceptualization of Busoni's creative work contributes to a better understanding of the forms that musical modernism can take when not tied to a clear break with the past as the sole criterion for significance., Erinn Knyt contributes to the continuing rich and diverse discussion of the musical modernist Ferruccio Busoni and offers us a blueprint for investigating his multi-faceted approach as a composer, pianist, arranger, teacher, thinker, and an architect of sound. For those either familiar or new to the works of Busoni this book provides conceptual, spatial, and structural understandings of a musician who experimented with cross-, inter-, and intra-disciplinary ways of exploring the multi-dimensional possibilities of tonality., Erinn Knyt shows how Busoni's abiding fascination with architecture as a medium and a metaphor illuminates his ambivalent relation to early musical modernism on multiple levels: from his allegiance to Bach and Mozart, the famous Bach transcriptions, the massive yet florid op. 39 Piano Concerto or the polystylistic labyrinth of Doktor Faust, and a high-modernist legacy from Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe to Xenakis and Morton Feldman. Connections with Jugendstil architect Henry Van de Velde and the Bauhaus school inform a conception of music as spatialized sound placing Busoni's commitments to old and new music, his own works, and his mentorship of diverse modernist talents in a striking new light. Knyt is unsurpassed as guide to all aspects of Busoni's multi-faceted career.

Erinn E. Knyt is Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Ferruccio Busoni and His Legacy, which was awarded an AMS 75 Pays Endowment Book Subvention Grant, and in 2018, she received an AMS Teaching Award for her article "Teaching Music History Pedagogy to Graduate Students." Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth- century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, Bach Reception, andperformance studies.