1st Edition
The New Bruckner Compositional Development and the Dynamics of Revision
The New Bruckner provides a valuable study of Bruckner's music, focusing on the interaction of biography, textual scholarship, reception history and analysis. Dr Dermot Gault conveys a broad chronological narrative of Bruckner's compositional development, interpolating analytical commentaries on the works and critical accounts of the notoriously complex and editorial issues. Gault corrects longstanding misconceptions about the composer's revision process, and its relationship with the early editions and widely-held critical opinions. Bruckner's constantly evolving engagement with symphonic form is traced by taking each revision in due order, rather than by taking each symphony on its own, and by relating the symphonies to other mature works such as the Te Deum, the three great Masses, and the Quintet, and argues that Bruckner's music became more organic and less schematic as the result of his revisions. The book will be essential reading for those studying Bruckner's compositions, the complex history of their reception, and late Romantic music in general.
Biography
Dermot Gault was born in Belfast and studied music at Queen's University Belfast, where he obtained a doctorate for a thesis on Bruckner's symphonies in 1994. He has contributed to The Bruckner Journal since its inception and addressed Bruckner Conferences in Nottingham and Oxford. He has also contributed to Music Ireland and The Irish Times.
'The New Bruckner is extremely well written and handsomely produced. All in all [...] a fine and impressive contribution to Bruckner studies, and Dermot Gault is to be warmly congratulated on a splendid achievement.' The Bruckner Journal '... these new scholarly insights, which have emerged from historical, contextual, and text-critical research, have profound implications for our understanding, performance, and appreciation of Bruckner’s music, yet non-scholarly constituencies (critics, commentators, performers, and especially fans) have been both slow and often hesitant to awaken to them... Gault reliably, and often perceptively, captures the gist of the new textual research and conceptual reorientation and from this perspective he draws a clear, comprehensible picture of the ’new Bruckner’.' Music and Letters 'Gault’s study represents an excellent contribution to the literature on Bruckner. Not only does The New Bruckner succeed in furnishing a new, more accurate picture of the Brucknerian processes of composition and revision, it offers an invaluable synthesis of the philological, biographical, and analytical insights that are slowly eliciting a more nuanced perception of the composer and his music. Bruckner specialists and nineteenth-century music scholars will benefit immensely from Gault’s achievement.' Music Theory Online 'Gault is an accomplished writer. His prose is clear and pleasing, and it faces and subdues difficult concepts without misrepresenting their difficulty. In short, this is a superb book. If you want to have a deep understanding of Bruckner’s editions and the processes that brought them into existence, this is the book to have.' American Record Guide
