Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone "color", "wet" acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words, "the illusory stuff of our dreams." This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both "classical" and "popular" music. These range, in "classical" music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in "popular" music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.

Is "goth music" a genre, and if so, how does it relate to the goth subculture? The music played at goth club nights and festivals encompasses a broad range of musical substyles, from gloomy Batcave reverberations to neo-medieval bagpipe drones and from the lush vocals of goth metal to the harsh distortion of goth industrial. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture argues that within this variegated musical landscape a number of key consistencies exist. Not only do all these goth substyles share a number of musical and textual characteristics, but more importantly these aspects of the music are constitutive of goth social reality. Drawing on their own experiences in the European and American goth scenes, the authors explore the ways in which the sounds of goth inform the scene's listening practices, its fantasies of other worlds, and its re-enchantment of their own world. Goth music, this book asserts, engenders a musical timespace of its own, a musical chronotope that is driven by nostalgic yearning. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture reorients goth subcultural studies onto music: goth music must be recognized not only as simultaneously diverse and consistent, but also as the glue that holds together goth scenes from all over the world. It all starts with the music.

Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich Schutz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred. Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Schutz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect."

Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich SchYtz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred. Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from SchYtz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect.

Is "goth music" a genre, and if so, how does it relate to the goth subculture? The music played at goth club nights and festivals encompasses a broad range of musical substyles, from gloomy Batcave reverberations to neo-medieval bagpipe drones and from the lush vocals of goth metal to the harsh distortion of goth industrial. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture argues that within this variegated musical landscape a number of key consistencies exist. Not only do all these goth substyles share a number of musical and textual characteristics, but more importantly these aspects of the music are constitutive of goth social reality. Drawing on their own experiences in the European and American goth scenes, the authors explore the ways in which the sounds of goth inform the scene's listening practices, its fantasies of other worlds, and its re-enchantment of their own world. Goth music, this book asserts, engenders a musical timespace of its own, a musical chronotope that is driven by nostalgic yearning. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture reorients goth subcultural studies onto music: goth music must be recognized not only as simultaneously diverse and consistent, but also as the glue that holds together goth scenes from all over the world. It all starts with the music.

Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in metaphors: tone “color”, “wet” acoustics, or in Schoenberg’s words, “the illusory stuff of our dreams.” This multi-disciplinary approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both “classical” and “popular” music. These range, in “classical” music, from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and electronic music to saturated music; and, in “popular” music, from indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.