Overview

A leading cultural theorist and musicologist opens up new possibilities for understanding mainstream Western art music-the ""classical"" music composed between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries that is, for many, losing both its prestige and its appeal. When this music is regarded esoterically, removed from real-world interests, it increasingly sounds more evasive than transcendent. Now Lawrence Kramer shows how classical music can take on new meaning and new life when approached from postmodernist standpoints. Kramer draws out the musical implications of contemporary efforts to understand reason, language, and subjectivity in relation to concrete human activities rather than to universal principles. Extending the rethinking of musical expression begun in his earlier Music as Cultural Practice, he regards music not only as an object that invites aesthetic reception but also as an activity that vitally shapes the personal, social, and cultural identities of its listeners. In language accessible to nonspecialists but informative to specialists, Kramer provides an original account of the postmodernist ethos, explains its relationship to music, and explores that relationship in a series of case studies ranging from Haydn and Mendelssohn to Ives and Ravel.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lawrence Kramer
Publisher:   University of California Press
Imprint:   University of California Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.544kg
ISBN:  

9780520207004

ISBN 10:   0520207009
Pages:   278
Publication Date:   29 November 1996
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
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Table of Contents

List of Musical Examples and Figure Preface Acknowledgments 1. Prospects Postmodernism and Musicology 2. From the Other to the Abject Music as Cultural Trope 3. Music and Representation In the Beginning with Haydn's Creation 4. Musical Narratology A Theoretical Outline 5. Felix Culpa Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Social Force of Musical Expression 6. The Lied as Cultural Practice Tutelage, Gender, and Desire in Mendelssohn's Goethe Songs 7. Cultural Politics and Musical Form The Case of Charles Ives 8. Consuming the Exotic Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Epilogue Autonomy, Elvis, Cinders, Fingering Bach Appendix: Mendelssohn: Three Goethe Songs Notes Index

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Author Information

Lawrence Kramer teaches in the Humanities Department at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, and is an active composer. He has published two previous books with California: Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984) and Music as Cultural Practice (1990). Both are available in paperback.

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