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One of the best-known prose stylists in contemporary musicology, Susan McClary brings together a fascinating set of essays in
Making Sense of Music that focus on temporality and the body as ways of understanding music. McClary grounds her readings within the specifics of historical time and place, even as she shows how the music itself relies on gesture and the body. In sum, this book demonstrates in case studies taken from a wide variety of practices how music draw upon and shapes human subjective experience.
List of contents
- Foreword by Peter Sellars
- Fundamentals: An Introduction
- I. Why I Do What I Do
- 1. A Life in Musicology: Stradella and Me
- 2. In Praise of Contingency: The Powers and Limits of Theory
- 3. Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music
- 4. Writing about Music - and the Music of Writing
- 5. The Bodies of Angels
- 6. The Lure of the Sublime: Revisiting Postwar Modernism
- 7. Playing the Identity Card: Of Grieg, Indians, and Women
- 8. The Object/The Objective of Analysis: The Case of Florence Price
- II. Messing With Early Music
- 9. Unwashed Masses: Music for the Morning After
- 10. Tumescence and Detumescence in a Monteverdi Madrigal
- 11. Doing the Time Warp in Seventeenth-Century Music
- 12. In the Realm of All the Senses: Analyzing the Music of Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la
- Guerre
- 13. Salome in the Court of Queen Christina
- 14. Adorno Plays the WTC
- III. Sex and Gender, Redux
- 15. The Classical Closet
- 16. Soprano Masculinities
- 17. Sister Campers
- 18. Kaija Saariaho, Mater
- 19. Mahler Making Love: Mengelberg's Adagietto
- Index
About the author
Susan McClary (Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) specializes in the cultural criticism of music. Her books include
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality;
Georges Bizet: Carmen;
Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form;
Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal;
Reading Music; Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music;
Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture;
The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music. She previously taught at University of Minnesota, McGill, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. McClary received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship in 1995, and her work has been translated into at least twenty languages.
