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Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of the controversial new musicology, integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues. This accessible and eloquently written book continues and deepens the trajectory of Kramer's thinking as it boldly argues that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. Kramer draws on a broad range of music and theory to show that the problem of musical meaning is not just an intellectual puzzle, but a musical phenomenon in its own right.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Sounding Out: Musical Meaning and Modern Experience
1. Hermeneutics and Musical History: A Primer without Rules, an Exercise with Schubert
2. Hands On, Lights Off: The "Moonlight" Sonata and the Birth of Sex at the Piano
3. Beyond Words and Music: An Essay on Songfulness
4. Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment
5. Rethinking Schumann’s Carnaval: Identity, Meaning, and the Social Order
6. Glottis Envy: The Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera
7. Hercules' Hautboys: Mixed Media and Musical Meaning
8. The Voice of Persephone: Musical Meaning and Mixed Media
9. Powers of Blackness: Jazz and the Blues in Modern Concert Music
10. Long Ride in a Slow Machine: The Alienation Effect from Weill to Shostakovich
11. Chiaroscuro: Coltrane’s American Songbook
12. Ghost Stories: Cultural Memory, Mourning, and the Myth of Originality
Notes
Index
About the author
Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, is an award-winning composer and the author of fifteen previous books, including The Thought of Music, which won the 2017 ASACP Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism, and most recently, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening.
Summary
Ranging widely over classical music, jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of new resources for understanding music. In this accessible and eloquently written book, he argues boldly that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. He demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value.
First published in 2001, Musical Meaning anticipates many of the musicological topics of today, including race, performance, embodiment, and media. In addition, Kramer explores music itself as a source of understanding via his composition Revenants for piano, revised for this edition and available on the UC Press website.
