Music article showcased by Brill

A 2026 article by Robert Samuels (Music) has been chosen by its publisher, Brill (Leiden) to be featured on the research showcase site, Kudos. The publisher considers it an important new contribution to “Word and Music Studies” through its claim that attempts to explain music through words amount to an exercise in creative writing.

The article analyses the first critical text ever published by the composer Robert Schumann (1831), which analyses a work for piano by Fryderyk Chopin via a piece of what Samuels calls “creative writing”, which has been persistently mis-read and mis-interpreted by previous scholars of music. The article is called ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On: Schumann, Ein Opus II Repeats Chopin, Op. 2, Varying Mozart, La ci darem la mano’ and is Chapter 5 in Repetition and Variation in Literature and Music (Word and Music Studies Vol. 23), edited by Frieder von Ammon & Axel Englund.