Departing from the traditional German school of music theorists, Michael Klein injects a unique French critical theory perspective into the framework of music and meaning. Using primarily Lacanian notions of the symptom, that unnamable jouissance located in the unconscious, and the registers of subjectivity (the Imaginary, the Symbolic Order, and the Real), Klein explores how we understand music as both an artistic form created by "the subject" and an artistic expression of a culture that imposes its history on this modern subject. By creatively navigating from critical theory to music, film, fiction, and back to music, Klein distills the kinds of meaning that we have been missing when we perform, listen to, think about, and write about music without the insights of Lacan and others into formulations of modern subjectivity.

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Ades and Dmitri Shostakovich."

"The outstanding originality of this book lies in the detail and perspicuity with which interrelations are traced between texts, it even seems that relations sometimes work backwards. Above all, this book does not offer a theory of intertextuality. Rather, it is a many-sided survey of the topic, open-ended and truthful. It is fresh and inspirational."
Raymond Monelle, Reader in Music at the University of Edinburgh and author of Linguistics and Semiotics in Music

Intertextuality in Western Art Music provides an interdisciplinary approach to the questions of music and meaning, using the approaches of Barthes, Foucault, Eco, Derrida, Levi-Strauss, and others. Drawing on research in aesthetics, hermeneutics, semiotics, narrativity, analysis, and musicology, Klein argues that each musical text is part of a cultural network of texts that code the ways we make sense of music.

Musical Meaning and Interpretation Robert S. Hatten, editor"