The Enjoyment of Music continues to teach students how to listen and connect to any kind of music. After more than fifty years of successfully preparing students for a lifetime of informed listening, the twelfth edition raises the bar with an expanded repertory of appealing music, an exciting new listening and assessment pedagogy and the richest and most user-friendly online resources available to students today.

The Enjoyment of Music, Essential Listening Edition, weaves together a concise text and rich media resources in a compact and affordable package that gives students all they need for an enriched listening experience. The new Fourth Edition features enhanced pedagogy built around new listening objectives and Listening Challenge online activities, a revised repertory that includes popular teaching pieces and streamlined Listening Guides that make it easier for students to identify the important things to listen for in each selection.

For nearly 70 years, The Enjoyment of Music has led the way in preparing students for a lifetime of listening to great music and understanding its cultural and historical context. The Fourteenth Edition expands on this foundation with new chapters and features that add many voices to its already rich repertoire.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"This is a rich and challenging collection, sparked by Rose Rosengard Subotnik's notion of 'structural listening, ' that offers a spirited critique of modernist aesthetic assumptions. Its authors write from a common perspective that sets their views at odds with the terms that have most commonly determined musical discourse in the twentieth century, and at the same time they consider listeners' involvement with a wide range of musics from the high modernism of Boulez and Barraque through the standard classical repertory to MTV. There is something here to interest every music scholar and listener."--Ruth A. Solie, author of "Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations

"The most impressive collection of separately authored essays musicology has yet seen. They are persuasive in their theoretical sophistication and in how they demonstrate original tactics for illuminating musical meanings. This collection is a landmark contribution that will take musical scholarship by surprise."--Robert Walser, author of "Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History

The early seventeenth century, when the first operas were written and technical advances with far-reaching consequences - such as tonal music - began to develop, is also notable for another shift: the displacement of aristocratic music-makers by a new professional class of performers. In this book, Andrew Dell'Antonio looks at a related phenomenon: the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing. Drawing from contemporaneous discourses and other commentaries on music, the visual arts, and Church doctrine, Dell'Antonio links the new ideas about cultivated listening with other intellectual trends of the period: humanistic learning, contemplative listening (or watching) as an active spiritual practice, and musical mysticism as an ideal promoted by the Church as part of the Catholic Reformation.