Dr. Anne Hyland publishes new book on Schubert’s String Quartets with Cambridge University Press

Schubert’s String Quartets the Teleology of Lyric Form Book Cover

Senior Lecturer in Music Analysis, Dr. Anne Hyland, announces the publication of her monograph: Schubert’s String Quartets: the Teleology of Lyric Form which appeared with Cambridge University Press in April.

The study challenges the influential but under-explored claim that Schubert could not successfully incorporate the lyric style into his sonatas, and offers a novel perspective on lyric form that embraces historical musicology, philosophy and music theory and analysis. 

Hyland’s exploration of the quartets reveals Schubert’s development of a lyrically conceived teleology which brings musical form, expression and temporality together in the service of fresh intellectual engagement.

As well as providing a broad historical overview of Schubert’s quartets and those of his more obscure contemporaries in Vienna, Schubert’s String Quartets: the Teleology of Lyric Form presents an in-depth study of form in the quartets themselves, especially their first movements.

Hyland’s analyses grant special focus to the relatively overlooked early quartets of 1810–16, isolating the questions they pose for music theory, and employing these as a means of scrutinising the relationship between the concepts of lyricism, development, closure and teleology.

This opens up space for these works to challenge some of the discourses that have historically beset them and offers a reframing of Schubert’s quartet oeuvre as central to the development of a decidedly nineteenth-century conception of lyric form.

A book launch is taking place on June 12th, 4pm at the 'CIDRAL Creations Launch' in the Atrium of the Ellen Wilkinson Building at the University of Manchester. The event is open and it will be followed by a wine reception.

Further information:

•  ‘A Genre of Two Halves? Schubert’s String Quartets Reimagined’ written by Dr Hyland for CUP’s ‘fifteeneightyfour’ academic blog.