Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 by Lawrence Kramer

Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 by Lawrence Kramer

In Music as Cultural Practice, Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society. In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University and a composer. His Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984), is available from California in paperback.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780520084438
ISBN 10	0520084438
Title	Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900
Author	Lawrence Kramer
Series	California Studies In 19th Century Music
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of California Press
Year published	1993-11-24
Number of pages	241
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.