Books by Susan McClary

Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of various cultural forms - notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance - to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s.

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 an interdisciplinary appeal. This title is intended for those interested in the life and times of a renegade musicologist.

Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, this book offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues. It tackles big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.

When it was originally published in 1991, Feminine Endings was immediately controversial for its unprecedented intermingling of cultural criticism and musical studies, an approach that came to be called "the New Musicology." Through case studies of works ranging from the canonical -- operas by Monteverdi and Bizet -- to the contemporary -- the performance art of Diamanda Galas and popular songs by Madonna -- Susan McClary focuses on the ways music produces images of gender, desire, pleasure, and the body, and explores the gender-based metaphors that circulate in discourse about music. The now classic work features a new introduction that discusses the critical reception it received and the debates it has inspired.