About the Book
Musical understanding has evolved dramatically in recent years, principally through a heightened appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This collection of essays by leading scholars addresses an aspect of meaning that has not yet received its due: the relation of meaning in this broad humanistic sense to the shaping of fundamental values. The volume examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by both individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value.
With a combination of cultural criticism and close readings of musical works, the contributors demonstrate repeatedly that to make music is also to make value, in every sense. They give particular attention to values that have historically enabled music to assume a formative role in human societies: to foster practices of contemplation, fantasy, and irony; to explore sexuality, subjectivity, and the uncanny; and to articulate longings for unity with nature and for moral certainty. Each essay in the collection shows, in its own way, how music may provoke transformative reflection in its listeners and thus help guide humanity to its own essential embodiment in the world.
The range of topics is broad and developed with an eye both to the historical specificity of values and to the variety of their possible incarnations. The music is both canonical and noncanonical, old and new. Although all of it is "classical," the contributors' treatment of it yields conclusions that apply well beyond the classical sphere. The composers discussed include Gabrieli, Marenzio, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Puccini, Hindemith, Schreker, and Henze.
Anyone interested in music as it is studied today will find this volume essential reading.
About the Author :
Keith Chapin is Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. He has taught at Fordham University (New York) and at the New Zealand School of Music (Wellington). He specializes in issues of critical theory, music aesthetics, and music theory in the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and in particular on issues of counterpoint. He has been Coeditor of Eighteenth- Century Music and Associate Editor of 19th-Century Music and sits on the editorial boards of these journals. He was coeditor (with Lawrence Kramer) of Musical Meaning and Human Values (2009). Recent articles have appeared in Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, and the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music.
Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He is the author of fifteen books, as well as editor of two previous annotated editions of poetry: Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition (NYRB, 2015) and Hart Crane's 'The Bridge': An Annotated Edition (Fordham, 2011).
Review :
"Brings to fruition the advances in richness and complexity in our thinking about music for which over two decades of groundbreaking scholarship in the New Musicology have prepared the field."----Gary C. Thomas "University of Minnesota"
A precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns.----Byron Adams "University of California, Riverside"
This remarkable collection of essays, which grew out of a symposium on Lawrence Kramer's work, shares his bold vision of musicology as an enterprise rooted in the world of human interactions, alert to the historical constitution of meaning while avoiding historicist relativism. Although traditional aesthetics had linked works of art to human values by portraying the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, these essays complicate that linkage by seeing the construction of values as a site of ambivalence and contestation. The interdisciplinary scope of the essays will appeal to readers far beyond the confines of any single field.----Kevin Korsyn "Author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research"
With star turn after star turn, Musical Meaning and Human Values unleashes a vast sprawl of keywords-Fantasy, Devotion, Performance, Eden, Evil, Law, Nature, Modernity-into an adventurous variety of musics and critical maneuvers, including close readings, open analyses, transdisciplinary encounters, Narratives Lost and Found. Rarely does a collection of essays so diverse stay so closely in tune with itself: the hermeneutic enterprise as realized by Lawrence Kramer over the past quarter century still exerts gravity enough to allow these lively spirits their multifarious orbits.----Scott Burnham "Princeton University"
. . . This interesting collection focuses on the inherent value and meaning within music and examines topics such as how music produces value and what the editors label 'moments of transformative reflection. . . An interesting and unusual collection indeed. Recommended.-- "--Choice"
Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihued
collection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Its
essays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editors
says, "making music is always making values," whether in
sixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hidden
unexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. While
variously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as a
cultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil characters
represented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspects
of modernity along the way, illuminating many of the values the essays explore.
----Ruth A. Solie "editor of Musicology and Difference, author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations"
