Books in the New Cultural History of Music series

The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies.

Language, education, politics, and music come together in Katherine Bergeron's Voice Lessons, a study of the French melodie in the Belle Epoque. Close readings of songs by Faure, Debussy, and Ravel, along with poems, sound recordings, and other historical documents, seek to uncovers the cultural meanings of this art: why it emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared.