Musical Meaning and Human Values (English, Keith Chapin | Lawrence Kramer)

Product description Review . . . 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"Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihuedcollection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Itsessays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editorssays, "making music is always making values," whether insixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hiddenunexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. Whilevariously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as acultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil charactersrepresented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspectsof 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"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 MinnesotaA precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns.-----Byron Adams, University of California, RiversideThis 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 ResearchWith 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 About the Author KEITH CHAPIN is Lecturer in Music History at the New Zealand School of Music. He is co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Music and an associate editor of Nineteenth-Century Music. Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University and the editor of Nineteenth-Century Music. He is also a composer. His many books range over the field of classical music from the eighteenth century to the present; recent titles include Why Classical Music Still Matters, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, Walt Whitman and Modern Music, and Musical Meaning and Human Values (with Keith Chapin; Fordham, 2009).