Musical Borrowing in Selected Piano Works of Ruth Schonthal

Abstract

Ruth Schonthal (1924-2006) was a Jewish-American composer and educator of German birth. She studied with Paul Hindemith at Yale University, yet would eventually reject his compositional style. She favored incorporating and transforming the music of the European tradition, and claimed inspiration from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Bartók, Scriabin, and Rachmaninoff. Her piano works incorporate and transform borrowed materials from those composers with her own compositional style.

This document analyzes Schonthal's musical borrowing techniques present in selected piano works. I provide a biographical portrait of Schonthal in the first chapter along with her achievements and stylistic influences. The following four chapters are devoted to three musical borrowing techniques that Schonthal employed: modeling, setting, and patchwork. Modeling is divided into two chapters. The first examines her modeling of Romantic piano literature, and the second focuses on modeling pedagogical repertoire. I have employed J. Peter Burkholder's typology of musical borrowing as the foundation for my study.

This topic is important because Schonthal's piano compositions are underrepresented in contemporary piano literature. Her focus on traditional forms ran counter to many of her contemporaries, yet in focusing on the music of the past, she was able to develop a mature compositional style that maintains relevance today. My aim is to provide an insight into Schonthal's mature compositional style and how musical borrowing influenced that style.