Schubert’s twenty-eight ballads provide an unusual perspective on his approach to writing for the piano for several reasons. First, the role of improvisation within balladeering was much more pronounced, traces of which remain within Schubert’s published works. Second, the piano was used to provide more explicit scene-setting, through the use of scenic effects, than is generally the case in Schubert’s other Lieder. Third, the ballads allow for the re-examination of narrative processes within nineteenth-century Lieder – in other words, how songs told stories.This chapter focuses on three ballads that show Schubert adopting different approaches to rendering poetic imagery in musical terms. It begins with his 1815 settings of Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher’, D77, and Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty’s ‘Die Nonne’, D212, considering their use of elaborate ‘Schauder’ or ‘shudder’ effects, which now tend to be dismissed as hackneyed but might instead be considered to offer access to often-overlooked aspects of early nineteenth-century performance culture. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, and of Schubert’s career, comes his simple strophic setting of Gottfried Herder’s ‘Edward’, D923 (1827). Concepts and practices of the ballad shifted over the course of Schubert’s career and would continue to do so for subsequent generations.

In The Segovia Technique (1972), Vladimir Bobri describes what a guitarist’s hand gesture must be to lean toward virtuosity. This search for the perfection of the “classical” gesture was, however, called into question by another virtuosity: that of rock music. The greatest guitarists of this genre never ceased to break the rules of this ideal gesture. In the first part of the chapter, this study briefly covers the electrification of the guitar and its consequences on guitar manufacturing and the development of the effects dedicated to guitar playing. I will then focus on the possible range of crossbreeding the classically inspired instrumental gesture before addressing Eddie Van Halen’s contribution. Finally, I will consider the influence that the rock virtuosos’ legacy, from Jimi Hendrix to Van Halen, brought to the instrumental gesture, and the tones used by composers of contemporary repertoire whose knowing use of technique has furthered the hybridization of genres.

During the twentieth century, the electric guitar rose to what Waksman (2001) has described as a “position of relative supremacy in the instrumental hierarchy of popular music” due in part to its ability to function effectively within and across the four textural layers present in popular music. While much of the stylistic research surrounding the electric guitar to date has focused on the lead guitar and its players due to the musical and cultural agency ascribed to the role, the aim of this chapter is to examine the electric rhythm guitar in popular music. The chapter offers a review of the literature and current knowledge surrounding the rhythm guitar and briefly discusses the often problematic divisions of labor between rhythm and lead playing. The chapter then assesses varied approaches to rhythm playing taken by electric guitar practitioners on key recordings from the genres of jazz, blues, R&B, rock and roll, funk, and disco. Rather than reinforcing an assumed binary opposition of lead and rhythm guitar functions, the chapter argues for a consideration of a rhythm-lead guitar spectrum/continuum supported by an assessment of the case studies presented in the chapter.

This chapter considers how the electric guitar is entwined with ecological issues—materially, culturally, and politically. Its first section discusses the electric guitar’s composite materials—metals, plastics, and especially woods—linking them to upstream impacts, legal and environmental conflicts. Disrupting the industry are environmental problems that interrupt material resource supply, including species endangerments, trade restrictions, and climate change. The second section considers new sustainability initiatives amid growing resource insecurity and a changing climate. Attempts at ecological recuperation encompass diversification of timbers, forest restoration, salvage supply chains, new materials, and urban tree planting schemes. The third section turns to guitar players, asking questions of how, as musicians, we find ourselves entwined within, and in many ways responsible for, the instrument’s ecological dilemmas. Throughout the chapter, we draw upon our long-standing research project tracing the guitar “in rewind” back to forest origins, including interview quotes from wood experts in the guitar industry that we have interviewed across the globe.

This chapter provide an overview of the ways that the bass guitar is most often used in popular music. Rather than discuss the instrument in terms of genre, I focus instead on its wider musical functions. As I argue, bass lines can largely be categorized by five common performative strategies: basic accompaniments, rhythmic- and groove-oriented approaches, melodic-oriented approaches, slap and pop styles, and the use of alternative instruments and techniques. While these strategies frequently overlap, this simplified taxonomy is intended to help listeners better appreciate how the bass shapes the overall sound and feel of a recording. By using a diverse cross-section of examples drawn from classic rock, metal, pop, R&B, soul, funk, reggae, disco, jazz, hip hop, and more, this chapter also highlights bass guitarists’ profound, wide-ranging impact on music history.

In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

Guitar playing styles have gradually, albeit substantially, changed over time. The new millennium in particular brought a fundamental change in playing techniques, primarily due to technological advances such as extended-range guitars. Established techniques were adapted to new instrument designs and their use in progressive musical styles. This chapter introduces novel approaches to melodic playing in three areas of progressive rock subgenres: percussive techniques, tapping, and using the thumb. The analysis of contemporary techniques includes adaptations from the electric bass that inspired thumping, slapping, and popping techniques. Concerning tapping, traditional shred tapping is complemented by forms of pianistic multi-finger and multi-role tapping, as well as percussive glitch and butterfly tapping. Finally, examining thumb use demonstrates that the picking-hand thumb is now involved in techniques such as under-strumming. The chapter shows how these techniques are used in progressive rock and metal, where virtuosity is expected and where guitarists must actively explore unique ways of playing to distinguish themselves from other skilled players.

In contrast to many contemporary composers, Franz Schubert was neither a virtuoso at the piano nor on any other instrument. His relationship to the piano appears rather pragmatic, in that he turned to the instrument when he was in demand: as a song accompanist and for dance music at Schubertiaden, as a four-handed partner or as a page-turner at larger events. He certainly did not see himself as a pianist, but first and foremost as a ‘composer’.This chapter explores Schubert’s public and semi-public appearances as a pianist by evaluating the contradictory statements about the quality and the quantity of his piano playing. It is concerned with his musical education, explores his piano playing in his later years and highlights his public appearance as a pianist. The comparison of Schubert’s biography with those of Viennese piano virtuosos and other composers sheds new light on the rapid development of the musical tastes of the Viennese bourgeois society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, the question of whether and to what extent the fact that Schubert was not present in the public concert life of his time diminished his career as a composer of ‘great’ works is discussed.

From 1810 to 1830, Viennese piano construction evolved in an attempt to combine the special sonority of Viennese instruments with new advances in technology. One important factor was the possibility of varying the sound between full and reduced or dampened action. A particularly striking change of sound could be produced by the soft or una corda pedal, which shifted the hammer rail so that the hammers struck only one rather than the standard three strings of a triple-strung piano. Although detailed knowledge of which composers wrote which works for which instrument is lacking, hypotheses can be advanced regarding the influence of the action of certain instruments on compositional style. A comparison of works by two composers from different generations – one earlier (Beethoven) and another later (Mendelssohn, who had a predilection for Viennese instruments in his youth) – sheds light on several peculiarities of Schubert’s piano music. Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s works of the 1820s both exploit this potential in order to coordinate sonority and structure. However, the two composers differ in one key respect: Beethoven tended to use the sonic contrasts he exploited (and meticulously notated) to articulate the work’s architecture, whereas Schubert used them to refine atmosphere and mood.

This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

This chapter introduces the electric guitar in Southeast Asia through its history, cultural and political significance, and signature within locally popular genres of music. For more than seventy years, the electric guitar has been a technology for aesthetic innovation and cultural exchange, inspiring new genres and intraregional scenes, and new playing techniques, instrumentation, and instrument manufacturing and trade. It has also been an agent of transformation for musicians, audiences, and even nations, attending to colliding epochs of decolonization, nation-building, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. It has inspired youth reverie and dissent, and censorship and oppression—a maligned symbol of Western imperialism and an essential tool of expressive freedom. The electric guitar has much to tell us about what Waksman calls “a deeper shift in the cultural disposition toward sound” and noise, as Southeast Asian guitarists have broadened their tonal and timbral palettes with new possibilities in electronic signaling, amplification, and distortion. But it has an equally important role in helping us understand the residual impacts of colonization, the rise of nations and youth cultures, and Southeast Asia’s past, present, and future.

In the early 1820s, music critics called attention to an innovative feature of certain Schubert Lieder: musical imagery in the piano accompaniment that both unifies the song and creates dramatic immediacy. Writers hailed this aspect of ‘Erlkönig’ (Op. 1) and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (Op. 2) in particular. The two songs’ main musical motifs – racing triplet rhythms evoking a galloping horse and a whirling sixteenth-note pattern evoking a spinning wheel – do more than provide unity and vivify the represented scene, however; they also powerfully contribute to the expression of changing emotions. The outer and inner worlds of the song persona(e) converge in, and are projected through, the piano accompaniment. This chapter examines the nature of musical imagery in Schubert Lieder, different ways that the musical motifs evolve, and the interpretive significance of those changes. The motif might be placed in new contexts, altered from within, fragmented, interrupted, or sounded with greater or lesser frequency, to the point of disappearing. Paradoxically, it might even evolve in meaning by resisting change. Songs analysed include ‘Erlkönig’, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Meeres Stille’, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, ‘Jägers Abendlied’, ‘Halt!’, ‘Gefrorne Tränen’, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, ‘Im Dorfe’, ‘Der Wegweiser’ and ‘Die Stadt’.

Analysis of addressee and writer–recipient relationships is a common methodology for the interpretation of written correspondence of ‘great’ composers. By contrast, when a musical text is the object of study, music philologists and performers alike tend to neglect such a contextual perspective when attempting to reveal its meaning – as if composers had no particular audience in mind when they wrote their piano music. This chapter attempts a characterisation of Schubert’s pianistic audience in Vienna as reflected in contemporary Viennese pianoforte treatises. The first part presents evidence to support such a geographically focused source selection – the distinctly nationalist stance of the Viennese pianoforte scene in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. The second part compiles a brief genre history of the Viennese pianoforte treatise – both produced in Vienna and imported from abroad – during Schubert’s lifetime. The third part deduces several common principles from this fascinating corpus of sources and reads selected passages from Schubert’s works through this lens, exemplifying how some of the traditional ‘problems’ can be resolved in the context of early nineteenth-century Viennese pianism.