An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more-from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon-explore the influence of music on their lives and work Contributors include: Laurie Anderson Jamie Barton Daphne A. Brooks Edgar Choueiri Jeff Dolven Gustavo Dudamel Edward Dusinberre Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim Frank Gehry James Ginsburg Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jane Hirshfield Pico Iyer Alexander Kluge Nathaniel Mackey Maureen N. McLane Alicia Hall Moran Jason Moran Paul Muldoon Elaine Pagels Robert Pinsky Richard Powers Brian Seibert Arnold Steinhardt Susan Stewart Abigail Washburn Carrie Mae Weems Susan Wheeler C. K. Williams Wu Fei What happens when extraordinary creative spirits-musicians, poets, critics, and scholars, as well as an architect, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a scientist, and a legendary Supreme Court justice-are asked to reflect on their favorite music? The result is Ways of Hearing, a diverse collection that explores the ways music shapes us and our shared culture. These acts of musical witness bear fruit through personal essays, conversations and interviews, improvisatory meditations, poetry, and visual art. They sound the depths of a remarkable range of musical genres, including opera, jazz, bluegrass, and concert music both classical and contemporary. This expansive volume spans styles and subjects, including Pico Iyer's meditations on Handel, Arnold Steinhardt's thoughts on Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Laurie Anderson and Edgar Choueiri's manifesto for spatial music. Richard Powers discusses the one thing about music he's never told anyone, Daphne Brooks draws sonic connections between Toni Morrison and Cecile McLorin Salvant, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg reveals what she thinks is the sexiest duet in opera. Poems interspersed throughout further expand how we can imagine and respond to music. Ways of Hearing is a book for our times that celebrates the infinite ways music enhances our lives.

For several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half of the volume confronts pressing issues of historical theory and aesthetics, including intellectual models of tonal theory, leading concepts of sonata form, translations of music into poetic meaning, and recent rifts and rapprochements between criticism and analysis. The essays in the second half can be read as a series of critical appreciations, engaging some of the most consequential reception tropes of the past two centuries: Haydn and humor, Mozart and beauty, Beethoven and the sublime, Schubert and memory.

An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more-from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon-explore the influence of music on their lives and work Contributors include: Laurie Anderson Jamie Barton Daphne A. Brooks Edgar Choueiri Jeff Dolven Gustavo Dudamel Edward Dusinberre Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim Frank Gehry James Ginsburg Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jane Hirshfield Pico Iyer Alexander Kluge Nathaniel Mackey Maureen N. McLane Alicia Hall Moran Jason Moran Paul Muldoon Elaine Pagels Robert Pinsky Richard Powers Brian Seibert Arnold Steinhardt Susan Stewart Abigail Washburn Carrie Mae Weems Susan Wheeler C. K. Williams Wu Fei What happens when extraordinary creative spirits-musicians, poets, critics, and scholars, as well as an architect, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a scientist, and a legendary Supreme Court justice-are asked to reflect on their favorite music? The result is Ways of Hearing, a diverse collection that explores the ways music shapes us and our shared culture. These acts of musical witness bear fruit through personal essays, conversations and interviews, improvisatory meditations, poetry, and visual art. They sound the depths of a remarkable range of musical genres, including opera, jazz, bluegrass, and concert music both classical and contemporary. This expansive volume spans styles and subjects, including Pico Iyer's meditations on Handel, Arnold Steinhardt's thoughts on Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Laurie Anderson and Edgar Choueiri's manifesto for spatial music. Richard Powers discusses the one thing about music he's never told anyone, Daphne Brooks draws sonic connections between Toni Morrison and Cecile McLorin Salvant, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg reveals what she thinks is the sexiest duet in opera. Poems interspersed throughout further expand how we can imagine and respond to music. Ways of Hearing is a book for our times that celebrates the infinite ways music enhances our lives.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In "Mozart's Grace," Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace.

Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

Bringing together reception history, music analysis and criticism, the history of music theory, and the philosophy of music, "Beethoven Hero" explores the nature and persistence of Beethoven's heroic style. What have we come to value in this music, asks Scott Burnham, and why do generations of critics and analysts hear it in much the same way? Specifically, what is it that fosters the intensity of listener engagement with the heroic style, the often overwhelming sense of identification with its musical process? Starting with the story of heroic quest heard time and again in the first movement of the "Eroica" Symphony, Burnham suggests that Beethoven's music matters profoundly to its listeners because it projects an empowering sense of self, destiny, and freedom, while modeling ironic self-consciousness.

In addition to thus identifying Beethoven's music as an overarching expression of values central to the age of Goethe and Hegel, the author describes and then critiques the process by which the musical values of the heroic style quickly became the controlling model of compositional logic in Western music criticism and analysis. Apart from its importance for students of Beethoven, this book will appeal to those interested in canon formation in the arts and in music as a cultural, ethical, and emotional force--and to anyone concerned with what we want from music and what music does for us.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In Mozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

Few composers even begin to approach Beethoven's pervasive presence in modern Western culture, from the concert hall to the comic strip. Edited by a cultural historian and a music theorist, "Beethoven and His World" gathers eminent scholars from several disciplines who collectively speak to the range of Beethoven's importance and of our perennial fascination with him.

The contributors address Beethoven's musical works and their cultural contexts. Reinhold Brinkmann explores the post-revolutionary context of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, while Lewis Lockwood establishes a typology of heroism in works like Fidelio. Elaine Sisman, Nicholas Marston, and Glenn Stanley discuss issues of temporality, memory, and voice in works at the threshold of Beethoven's late style, such as "An die Ferne Geliebte," the Cello Sonata op. 102, no. 1, and the somewhat later Piano Sonata op. 109. Peering behind the scenes into Beethoven's workshop, Tilman Skowroneck explains how the young Beethoven chose his pianos, and William Kinderman shows Beethoven in the process of sketching and revising his compositions.

The volume concludes with four essays engaging the broader question of reception of Beethoven's impact on his world and ours. Christopher Gibbs' study of Beethoven's funeral and its aftermath features documentary material appearing in English for the first time; art historian Alessandra Comini offers an illustrated discussion of Beethoven's ubiquitous and iconic frown; Sanna Pederson takes up the theme of masculinity in critical representations of Beethoven; and Leon Botstein examines the aesthetics and politics of hearing extramusical narratives and plots in Beethoven's music.

Bringing together varied and fresh approaches to the West's most celebrated composer, this collection of essays provides music lovers with an enriched understanding of Beethoven--as man, musician, and phenomenon.

Winner, Design Edge Regional Design AwardIn October 2001, paint was spilled on the streets of Montreal. A stark, primitive bike symbol, looking suspiciously like the one the city used to designate a bike path; a giant zipper, pulled open down the centre line of the street on a busy commuter route; the footprint of a giant, stomping through the city while people slept. Inspired by a desire for adventure and galvanized by a loathing of car culture, Roadsworth got down with an idea that had been incubating. The time had come for him to articulate his artistic vision, to challenge the notion of "public" space and whose right it is to use it. By 2004, Roadsworth had pulled off close to 300 pieces of urban art on the streets of Montreal. In the fall, he was charged with 51 counts of public mischief. It seemed to signal the end of his career. Instead the citizens of Montreal and lovers of his work from around the world rallied their support. A year later he was let off with a slap on the wrist. Since then, Roadsworth has developed as an artist, continuing to intervene in public spaces and to travel the world, executing commissioned work for organizations such as Cirque de Soleil, The Lost O (cycled over in le tour de France), and for municipalities, exhibitions, and arts festivals. In this playful and sometimes subversive book, featuring more than 200 reproductions of his unmistakable work, Roadsworth takes the urban landscape and turns its constituent elements on their heads, both indicting our culture's excesses and celebrating what makes us human (lest we forget).

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. Drawing on idealist aesthetics and the ideology of Bildung, he developed a holistic pedagogical method as well as a theory of musical form that gives pride of place to Beethoven. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented here in English for the first time. It features Marx's oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the last two centuries: the relation of form and content, the analysis of instrumental music, the role of pedagogy in music theory, and the nature of musical understanding.

A. B. Marx was one of the most important German music theorists of his time. This volume offers a generous selection of the most salient of his writings, the majority presented in English for the first time. It features the oft-cited but little understood material on sonata form, his progressive program for compositional pedagogy and his detailed critical analysis of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. These writings thus deal with issues that fall directly among the concerns of mainstream theory and analysis in the past two centuries.

For several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half of the volume confronts pressing issues of historical theory and aesthetics, including intellectual models of tonal theory, leading concepts of sonata form, translations of music into poetic meaning, and recent rifts and rapprochements between criticism and analysis. The essays in the second half can be read as a series of critical appreciations, engaging some of the most consequential reception tropes of the past two centuries: Haydn and humor, Mozart and beauty, Beethoven and the sublime, Schubert and memory.