Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of California Press
Published:10th Nov '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This pathbreaking study of Italian stage works reconsiders a crucial period of music history: the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century. In her interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows how enlightenment ideas influenced Italian theater and music and vice versa. As Lockhart concludes, the animated statue became a fundamental figure within aesthetic theory and musical practice during the years spanning 1770-1830. Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830 begins with an exploration of a repertoire of Italian ballets, melodramas, and operas from around 1800, then traces and connects a set of core ideas between science, philosophy, theories of language, itinerant performance traditions, the epistemology of sensing, and music criticism.
"As with any scholarship that treats its material with sensitivity and thoroughness, here the subject justifies itself and the reader is motivated to keep reading—both within the book and without. That, after all, is perhaps the highest praise one could offer any new work, particularly one that disentangles such a beautiful can of worms." * European History Quarterly *
"Deftly traversing a wide range of sources, Lockhart shows how the animated statue ties together a rich late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century world of musical theater, aesthetic theory, nationhood fantasies, sciences of the body, and notions of self. . . . by the end, one is left wondering not what animation and plasticity have to do with music, nor in what respect late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italy matters to broader music historical developments, but how we ever thought we could understand this period or the longer history of aesthetics without attending to the statue that comes to life. Like the ruin pictured on its cover, this work seems destined to endure.” * Journal of the American Musicological Society *
ISBN: 9780520284432
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm
Weight: 408g
232 pages