The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music

-First systematic combination of musicologists and historians.
-Demonstrates how music is becoming unique mode of access into specific cites of cultural representation, exchange, contestation and the construction of experience.
-New theoretical dimensions or inquiries characteristic of "the New Cultural History of Music".
-Features contributors at the forefront of both musicology and history.

This volume demonstrates the recent direction of cultural history, as it is now being practiced in both history and musicology, to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding and meaning-how they are constructed, negotiated and communicated on both an individual and a social level. Just as historians in their quest to understand the construction and transmission of meaning, musicologists are turning to new inquiries into cultural representations and their social dynamics, while remaining aware of music's distinctive "register" of representation as an abstract language and a performing art. As the case studies analyzed by musicologists and historians in this volume attest, both fields are not only posing similar questions but attempting to study music itself together with the relevant framing factors and contexts that imbued it with meaning. They are seeking to do so within a factually accurate yet theoretically sophisticated interpretation that combines the insights into language and semiotics characteristic of "the new cultural history" and "new musicology" of the 1980s and '90s with more recent sociological theories and their perspective on how symbols function within the larger field of social power.

The volume illuminates how musicologists and historians are practicing the new cultural history of music, employing similar rubrics and specifically those emerging from the recent synthesis of theoretical perspectives on language, symbols, meanings, and their social as well as political dynamics. These include questions of cultural identity and its expression, or its constructions, representations and exchanges, into which music provides a significant mode of access. The scholars who work in these areas are concerned with those cultural sites of the construction or attempted control of identity, as well as its interrogation through active agency on a social and on an individual level, which embraces subjectivity in its relation to the larger cultural unit. Here we may see attempts on the part of both historians and musicologists to engage with the new ways of perceiving the articulation of music, ideology, and politics opened up by figures such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Elias, Habermas and others. Their study of meanings and symbols is thus both relational and contextual as they strive to unlock the idioms not only of social and political power, but of the strategies of contestation or of refusal.

Other scholars represented in this volume are particularly interested in cultural practice, collective memory, transmission and evaluation as it is forged and then negotiated, here influenced by figures such as de Certeau, Corbin, Chartier and Nora. Hence a part of this collection is devoted to cultural experience, practice and appropriations, grouping together those cultural arenas in which music both illuminates and is further illuminated by a study of uses, collective practices, modes of inscription, and of evaluation or reception. The contributors here, both historians and musicologists, are apprised of all the dimensions that may affect the construction of signification, including specific material inscriptions as well as the symbolic potential of the artistic language. Hence here we see a concern, characteristic of "the new cultural history," with how the forms assumed by texts may become an essential element in the creation of their meaning since different groups encounter, "possess," and experience a work in various ways, and within the context of substantially different aural and visual cultures.

CONTENIDO:

Introduction: Defining the new cultural history of music, its origins, methodologies, and lines of inquiry (Jane F. Fulcher)

Part I. Cultural identity and its expression: constructions, representations, and exchanges

Constructions or representations of the body, gender, sexuality, and race
1. Gender, performativity, and allusion in Medieval services for the Consecration of Virgins (James Borders)
2. Music, violence, and the stakes of listening (Richard Leppert)
3. Music and pain (Andreas Dorschel)

Subjectivity and the shaping of the self in society
4. "The road into the open": from narrative closure to the endless performance of subjectivity in Mahler and Freud at the turn of the Century (John E. Toews)
5. Understanding Schoenberg as Christ (Julie Brown)
6. The strange landscape of Middles (Michael Beckerman)

Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism
7. The genre of national opera in a European comparative perspective (Philipp Ther)
8. Cosmopolitan, national and regional identities in Eighteenth-Century European musical life (William Weber)
9. Mendelssohn on the road: music, travel, and the Anglo-German symbiosis (Celia Applegate)

Elite and popular cultural exchanges
10. "Shooting the eyes": Musical horseplay and high culture (Charles Hiroshi Garrett)
11. Yvette Guilbert and the revaluation of the Chanson populaire and Chanson ancienne during the Third Republic, 1889-1914 (Jacqueline Waeber)
12. Remembrance of Jazz past: Sidney Bechet in France (Andy Fry)

Part II. Cultural experience: practices, appropiations, and evaluations

Urban, aural, and print culture
13. An evening at the opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Edward Muir)
14. Josquin des Prez, Renaissance historiography, and the cultures of print (Kate van Orden)
15. From "the voice of the Maréchal" to Music concrète: Pierre Schaeffer and the case for cultural history

Symbols, icons, and sites of collective memory or ritual
16. A matter of style: state sacrificial music and cultural-political discourse in Southern song China, 1127-1279 (Joseph S. C. Lam)
17. Ernani hats: Italian opera as a repertoire of political symbols during the Risorgimento (Carlotta Sorba)
18. Modalities of national identity: Sibelius builds a First Symphony (James Hepokoski)

Politics, aesthetics, and transmission
19. Beethoven, Napoleon, and political romanticism (Leon Plantinga)
20. Translating Herder translating: cultural translation and the making of modernity (Philip V. Bohlman)
21. The eye of the needle: music as history after the age of recording (Leon Botstein)

Afterword: Whose culture? Whose history? Whose music? (Michael P. Steinberg)

Index