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In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary
presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian
madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the
Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of
complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast
range of new signifying practices: musical representations of
emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions
between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only
greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also
recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood,
making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of
Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivities covers the span of the
sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early
manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in
the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo
Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping
her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music
itself-the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order
to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal
repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her
to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic
of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might
glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal
artistic enterprises.
This outstanding collection of Susan McClary's work exemplifies her
contribution to a bridging of the gap between historical context,
culture and musical practice. The selection includes essays which
have had a major impact on the field and others which are less
known and reproduced here from hard-to-find sources. The volume is
divided into four parts: Interpretation and Polemics, Gender and
Sexuality, Popular Music, and Early Music. Each of the essays
treats music as cultural text and has a strong interdisciplinary
appeal. Together with the autobiographical introduction they will
prove essential reading for anyone interested in the life and times
of a renegade musicologist.
A groundbreaking collection of essays in feminist music criticism,
this book addresses problems of gender and sexuality in repertoires
ranging from the early seventeenth century to rock and performance
art. ". . . this is a major book . . . [McClary's] achievement
borders on the miraculous." The Village Voice"No one will read
these essays without thinking about and hearing music in new and
interesting ways. Exciting reading for adventurous students and
staid professionals." Choice"Feminine Endings, a provocative
'sexual politics' of Western classical or art music, rocks
conservative musicology at its core. No review can do justice to
the wealth of ideas and possibilities [McClary's] book presents.
All music-lovers should read it, and cheer." The Women's Review of
Books"McClary writes with a racy, vigorous, and consistently
entertaining style. . . . What she has to say specifically about
the music and the text is sharp, accurate, and telling; she hears
what takes place musically with unusual sensitivity."-The New York
Review of Books
Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute 6"We have developed a
tremendous amount of what might best be referred to as journalistic
knowledge concerning the ways that musicians of earlier periods
thought about musical structures. Now that we have that knowledge,
what might we do with it?" Joel LesterThe often complex connections
and intersections between modal and tonal idioms and contrapuntal
and harmonic organization during the transition from the
Renaissance to the Baroque era are considered from various
perspectives in Towards Tonality. Prominent musicians and scholars
from a wide range of fields testify here to their personal
understanding of this significant time of shifts in musical taste.
This collection of essays is based on lectures presented during the
conference "Historical Theory, Performance, and Meaning in Baroque
Music," organized by the International Orpheus Academy for Music
and Theory in Ghent, Belgium."
With her usual combination of erudition, innovation, and spirited
prose, Susan McClary reexamines the concept of musical convention
in this fast-moving and refreshingly accessible book. Exploring the
ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge,
"Conventional Wisdom" offers an account of our own cultural moment
in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues. McClary
looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves
easily across a broad range of repertoires - the blues,
eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap. As one of
the most influential trailblazers in contemporary musical
understanding, McClary once again moves beyond the borders of the
'purely musical' into the larger world of history and society, and
beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a
musical pluralism. Those who know McClary only as a feminist writer
will discover her many other sides, but not at the expense of
gender issues, which are smoothly integrated into the general
argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling
the story of Western music, "Conventional Wisdom" bravely tackles
big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern
repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that
create and enjoy them.
Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the
Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from
expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical
changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in
words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably
the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of
Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how
artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with
human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s.
Essays from prominent historians, musicologists, and art critics
examine methods of non-verbal cultural expression through the broad
themes of time, motion, the body, and global relations. Together,
they show that seventeenth-century cultural expression was more
than just an embryonic stage within Western artistic development.
Instead, the contributors argue that this period marks some of the
most profound changes in European subjectivities.
In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary
presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian
madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the
Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of
complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast
range of new signifying practices: musical representations of
emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions
between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only
greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also
recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood,
making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of
Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivities covers the span of the
sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early
manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in
the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo
Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping
her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music
itself - the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In
order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal
repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her
to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic
of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might
glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal
artistic enterprises.
In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which
seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states -
desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how
every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to
instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for
heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes
the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on
expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also
links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the
period. McClary shows how musicians - whether working within the
contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists
courts or commercial enterprises in Venice - were able to
manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of
experiencing time and the Self.
Philip BrettOCOs groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered
the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century.
This volume is the first to gather in one collection BrettOCOs
searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some
of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while
the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of
BrittenOCOs work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine
the new musicology. Addressing urgent questions of how an
artistOCOs sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into
specific musical texts, Brett examines most of BrittenOCOs operas
as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the
mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for
the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of
BrittenOCOs musical achievement and highlights the many ways that
Brett expanded the borders of his field."
Bizet's Carmen is probably the best known opera of the standard repertoire, yet its very familiarity often prevents us from approaching it with the seriousness it deserves. This Handbook explores the opera in a number of contexts, bringing to the surface the controversies over gender, race, class and musical propriety. After a study of Mérimée's story Carmen by Peter Robinson, Susan McClary examines the social tensions in nineteenth-century France that inform both that story and the opera, and traces the opera through its genesis and reception. The Handbook concludes with discussions of four films based on the opera. The volume contains a bibliography, music examples, and a synopsis and will be of interest to students, scholars, and operagoers.
This provocative volume of essays is now available in paperback.
The contributors to this volume - musicologists, sociologists,
cultural theorists - all challenge the view that music occupies an
autonomous aesthetic sphere. Recently, socially and politically
grounded enterprises such as feminism, semiotics and deconstruction
have effected a major transformation in the ways in which the arts
and humanities are studied, leading in turn to a systematic
investigation of the implicit assumptions underlying the critical
methods of the last two hundred years. Influenced by these
approaches, the writers here question a prevailing ideology that
insists there is a division between music and society and examine
the ways in which the two do in fact interact and mediate one
another within and across socio-cultural boundaries.
Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
oncetermed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to
prove a point,persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who
disagrees.Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such
rhetoric tendsto drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which
forego forcefulargument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love,
sentiment, reform,care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The
Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out inour serious games
of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths ofparanoid and
reparative affects through illness narratives, academicwork, queer
life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy
subjects,William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our
daily orientationstoward scholarship, self, and sound. How we
choose to think aboutthe perpetration and tolerance of critical and
acoustic offenses mayultimately lead us down avenues of ethical
ruin—or, if we choose, repair.With recourse to experimental
rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion,and the playful wisdoms of
childhood, Cheng contends that reparativeattitudes toward music and
musicology can serve as barometers of betterworlds.
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