Musical Meaning and Human Values
Lawrence Kramer editor Keith Chapin editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fordham University Press
Published:15th Aug '09
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£74.00(9780823230099)
Musical understanding has evolved dramatically in recent years, principally through a heightened appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This collection of essays by leading scholars addresses an aspect of meaning that has not yet received its due: the relation of meaning in this broad humanistic sense to the shaping of fundamental values. The volume examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by both individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value.
With a combination of cultural criticism and close readings of musical works, the contributors demonstrate repeatedly that to make music is also to make value, in every sense. They give particular attention to values that have historically enabled music to assume a formative role in human societies: to foster practices of contemplation, fantasy, and irony; to explore sexuality, subjectivity, and the uncanny; and to articulate longings for unity with nature and for moral certainty. Each essay in the collection shows, in its own way, how music may provoke transformative reflection in its listeners and thus help guide humanity to its own essential embodiment in the world.
The range of topics is broad and developed with an eye both to the historical specificity of values and to the variety of their possible incarnations. The music is both canonical and noncanonical, old and new. Although all of it is “classical,” the contributors’ treatment of it yields conclusions that apply well beyond the classical sphere. The composers discussed include Gabrieli, Marenzio, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Puccini, Hindemith, Schreker, and Henze.
Anyone interested in music as it is studied today will find this volume essential reading.
"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
ISBN: 9780823230105
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
226 pages