""Boccherini's Body" is extremely important, both for its new directions and for its unique combination of interests. It offers a considerable amount of little-known material, and does so daringly and skillfully. Le Guin is a joy to read."--John Butt, author of "Playing With History"
"Virtuoso writing by a professional performer, this book unites history, biography, cultural studies, and a physically-lived sense of Boccherini's music. It is a work of unusual scholarly imagination; not only does it bring an under-studied body of music to light, but it also introduces new ways to think about performance in historical context."--Mary Hunter, author of the "Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna"
"Le Guin's book is an adventure in new forms of musical analysis, with a beguilingly passionate, yet rigorous style of philosophical introspection. Her book explodes old analytical paradigms, attending to the technologies and erotics of musical performance in ways some have wanted to do but none have achieved as Le Guin has. This book will catapult Le Guin to stardom."--Martha Feldman, author of "City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice"

The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain. This book, the first major study of the tonadilla in English, examines the musical, theatrical, and social worlds that the tonadilla brought together and traces the lasting influence this genre has had on the historiography of Spanish music. The tonadillas' careful constructions of musical populism provide a window onto the tensions among Enlightenment modernity, folkloric nationalism, and the politics of representation; their diverse, engaging, and cosmopolitan music is an invitation to reexamine tired old ideas of musical "Spanishness." Perhaps most radically of all, their satirical stance urges us to embrace the labile, paratextual nature of comic performance as central to the construction of history.