Books in the New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism series

In The Singing of the New World Gary Tomlinson offers histories of ancient music long since silent: the songs of the Indians that Europeans met in the sixteenth century. Merging recent cultural history with early European accounts and modern archaeological findings, Tomlinson explores the place of singing in these societies.

Drawing on evidence from a wide array of musical, linguistic, and visual sources, this book demonstrates that early American colonization shaped European music cultures in fundamental ways. It offers a fresh, politically and transculturally informed approach to the study of music in the early colonial Atlantic world.

Schoenberg and Redemption presents a new way of understanding Schoenberg's step into atonality in 1908. Reconsidering his threshold and early atonal works, as well as his theoretical writings and a range of previously unexplored archival documents, Julie Brown argues that Schoenberg's revolutionary step was in part a response to Wagner's negative charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music. In 1898, and especially 1908, Schoenberg's Jewish identity came into confrontation with his commitment to Wagnerian modernism to provide an impetus to his radical innovations. While acknowledging the broader turn-of-the-century Viennese context, Brown draws special attention to continuities between Schoenberg's work and that of Viennese moral philosopher Otto Weininger, himself an ideological Wagnerian. She also considers the afterlife of the composer's ideological position when, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the concept of redeeming German culture of its Jewish elements took a very different turn.

With new information on four generations of women musicians, this book expands and alters the narratives that scholars and musicians have told about music in sixteenth-century Ferrara. A radical perspective on a familiar repertoire, it proposes a new way of thinking with consequences for music history and performance practice.

This volume reveals the role of music in nineteenth-century British liberalism, exploring the politics, culture, and ideology of Victorian elite society using archival material relating to Mary Gladstone, daughter of the reforming British prime minister. It will interest scholars working in numerous fields including music, literature, politics, history, and women's studies.

What does it mean to say that music is deeply moving? Or that music's aesthetic value derives from its deep structure? This study traces the widely employed trope of musical depth to its origins in German-language music criticism and analysis. From the Romantic aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann to the modernist theories of Arnold Schoenberg, metaphors of depth attest to the cross-pollination of music with discourses ranging from theology, geology and poetics to psychology, philosophy and economics. The book demonstrates that the persistence of depth metaphors in musicology and music theory today is an outgrowth of their essential role in articulating and transmitting Germanic cultural values. While musical depth metaphors have historically served to communicate German nationalist sentiments, Watkins shows that an appreciation for the broad connotations of those metaphors opens up exciting new avenues for interpretation.

Examining the musical representation of the myth of Arcadia in sixteenth-century Italy, this book provides insights into the role of music in the preservation of cultural myths. A range of different musical genres are covered, including the madrigal, music for theater, and early opera.

Political Beethoven provides a completely new account of the avalanche of political music by Beethoven and his contemporaries composed in the fraught atmosphere of Napoleonic Vienna and explores the musical, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that have made this music such a potent force in political life to the present day.

An important and provocative contribution to the burgeoning literature on the Ballets Russes, this book examines the relation between music, dance and the cultural politics of belle-epoque Paris. Davinia Caddy presents fresh perspectives on the broadly acknowledged innovations of the Ballets Russes, opening up important new areas for debate.

The German-Jewish emigre composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus to bebop to Black Mountain College. This first full-length study of this often overlooked composer brings together perspectives from the fields of music, visual art, literature and migration.

Exploring the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, Freitas tells how the castrato Atto Melani rose to musical and social prominence. Whether Atto was singing, spying, having sex, composing, or rejecting his art, this book illustrates how music-making was always also a negotiation for power.

Bonnie Gordon uses the music of Monteverdi, written at the turn of the seventeenth century, to illuminate understandings of music, science and the female body at that cultural moment. Her findings are based on singing treatises, renaissance medical writings and seventeenth-century acoustics.

By situating Riemann's musical thought within turn-of-the-century discourses about the natural sciences, German nationhood and modern technology, this book reconstructs the cultural context in which Riemann's ideas not only 'made sense' but advanced an understanding of the tonal tradition as both natural and German.

Dana Gooley examines the concert career of the great nineteenth-century piano virtuoso Franz Liszt. It is the first book to examine in depth how Liszt's contemporaries perceived him and interpreted his significance. The author offers many new insights about Liszt's highly original performing style.

'Characteristic' symphonies have texts associating them with literature, politics, religion, and other aspects of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European culture. This first full-length study of the genre illuminates the relationship between symphonies and their aesthetic and social context and discusses examples of works by composers including Beethoven, Haydn and Dittersdorf.

This book considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and affect the way we create, perform and listen to music.

This book explores the role of music in an early fourteenth-century French manuscript. It sets the manuscript against the wider culture of Parisian book-making, showing how in devising new systems of design and folio layout, its creators developed a new kind of materiality in music.

This book examines the intellectual history of instrumental music, particularly the idea of absolute music. It shows how certain ideas in philosophy, theology and the sciences affect the meaning of instrumental music, and how instrumental music in turn permeates human discourse and helps construct meaning.

Offers interpretations of many of Bach's late compositions which include complex musical techniques such as canon. These techniques had significant meanings attached to them which were crucial to, for example, the Lutheran rituals of death and Enlightenment philosophies of stylistic change and musical progress.

Throughout the twentieth century, musicians frequently incorporated bits of other works into their own compositions and performances. This book explores the practice, examining how musicians used quotation to participate in the cultural dialogues sustained around such areas as race, childhood, madness and the mass media.

A characteristic feature of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera is the use of substantial orchestral links between scenes and before a closed curtain. These interludes often take on very prominent roles, representing dream sequences, journeys and sexual encounters. Christopher Morris investigates the implications of these important but strangely overlooked passages.

The aesthetic of the picturesque, derived from the controlled wilderness of the landscape garden, provided writers on music with a language in which to describe the free fantasia, and it emerges here as a vital means for understanding the fantastical elements in the music of Bach, Haydn and Beethoven.

This book puts Wagner's writings on musical subjects into a broad historical-critical context. It looks at central themes in his writings, and connects them with analyses of music from his own operas and of works by other composers about whom he wrote.

Embodied Voices explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of theories of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference and through a wide spectrum of discourses, including literature, music and film.

This study analyses reflections on music and music theory as they appear within the logical and narrative structure of texts by, for example, Rousseau, Diderot, Rameau and Condillac, and considers the ways in which music facilitates links between language and meaning, between conceptions of an original society and an ideal social order.

This is the first book to explain how rap is put together musically. Whereas popular music scholarship tends to dismiss music analysis as of limited value, Krims argues that it can be crucial to cultural theory. It brings together perspectives from music theory, musicology, cultural studies, critical theory, and communications.

This book explores the evolution of, and interactions between, fantasy and music in Romantic France, providing new contexts for the study of Berlioz and his contemporaries. The volume will appeal to readers beyond the musicological community, drawing together musical, literary, scientific, and visual materials, and applying theoretical and historical approaches.

Drawing on an exceptionally broad range of sources, in this book Kreuzer explores how Italian opera, epitomised by Giuseppe Verdi, influenced ideas of German musical and national identity from the mid nineteenth century onwards. The book discusses the changing image of Verdi and the transnational dissemination, reception and political appropriation of his works.