Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response

Why does music move us? Lawrence Kramer suggests we should ask this old question in a different way: what is responsible for our response to music, and to what is our response responsible? The essays in this outstanding collection try to answer this question amongst many others, and by finding cultural meaning in music they exemplify the critical turn in musicology. Sixteen essays have been selected, most of them previously published, from the late 1980s to the present day. These are prefaced by an excellent introduction which traces the intellectual development of critical musicology and discusses the part these essays have had to play in that movement.

CONTENIDO

-Introduction
-Selected bibliography
1. Tropes and windows: an outline of musical hermaneutics
2. Decadence and desire: the 'Wilhelm Meister' songs of Wolf and Schubert
3. Dangerous Liaisons: the literary text in musical criticism
4. Music criticism and the postmodern turn: in contrary motion with Gary Tomlinson
5. Charging the Canons
6. The strange case of Beethoven's 'Coriolan' : romantic aesthetics, modern subjectivity, and the cult of Shakespeare
7. The harem threshold: Turkish music and Greek love in Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'
8. Primitive encounters: Beethoven's 'Tempest' sonata, musical meaning, and enlightenment anthropology
9. Tolstoy's Beethoven, Beethoven's Tolstoy: the Kreutzer sonata
10. Like falling leaves: the erotics of mourning in four drum taps settings
11. Chopin at the funeral: episodes in the history of modern death
12. Recognizing Schubert: musical subjectivity, cultural change and Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady
13. Haydn's chaos, Schenker's order; or, musical meaning and musical analysis: can they mix?
14. Speaking melody, melodic speech
15. 'Longindying Call': of music, modernity, and the Sirens
16. 'Au-delà d'une musique informelle': nostalgia, obsolescence, and the avant-garde
-Index