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 tangible architectural 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. Transcending physical 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 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, and performance studies.