Musical Meaning and Human Values

"With star turn after star turn, Musical Meaning and Human Values unleashes a vast sprawl of keywords-Fantasy, Devotion, Performance, Eden, Evil, Law, Nature, Modernity-into an adventurous variety of musics and critical maneuvers, including close readings, open analyses, transdisciplinary encounters, Narratives Lost and Found. Rarely does a collection of essays so diverse stay so closely in tune with itself: the hermeneutic enterprise as realized by Lawrence Kramer over the past quarter century still exerts gravity enough to allow these lively spirits their multifarious orbits." -- -Scott Burnham Princeton University "Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihued collection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Its essays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editors says, "making music is always making values," whether in sixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hidden unexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. While variously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as a cultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil characters represented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspects of modernity along the way, illuminating many of the values the essays explore." -- -Ruth A. Solie editor of Musicology and Difference, author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations "... This interesting collection focuses on the inherent value and meaning within music and examines topics such as how music produces value and what the editors label 'moments of transformative reflection... An interesting and unusual collection indeed. Recommended." -Choice "This remarkable collection of essays, which grew out of a symposium on Lawrence Kramer's work, shares his bold vision of musicology as an enterprise rooted in the world of human interactions, alert to the historical constitution of meaning while avoiding historicist relativism. Although traditional aesthetics had linked works of art to human values by portraying the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, these essays complicate that linkage by seeing the construction of values as a site of ambivalence and contestation. The interdisciplinary scope of the essays will appeal to readers far beyond the confines of any single field." -- -Kevin Korsyn Author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research "A precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns." -- -Byron Adams University of California, Riverside "Brings to fruition the advances in richness and complexity in our thinking about music for which over two decades of groundbreaking scholarship in the New Musicology have prepared the field." -- -Gary C. Thomas University of Minnesota