Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology - Softcover

Kerman, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674166787 ISBN 13: 9780674166783

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2004

Synopsis

With this book, Joseph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music--with which musicology is traditionally equated--but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.

Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music toward a critical orientation. As examples, he presents fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950s and Beethoven studies in the 1960s. He sketches the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Milton Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster's songs into the canons of "black" music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Contemplating Music is filled with wisdom and trenchant commentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Kerman is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University for 1997-98.

From the Back Cover

Contemplating Music is a book for all serious music lovers. Here is the first full-scale account of ideas and ideologies in music over the past forty years, a period during much virtually every aspect of music was transformed.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674166787
• ISBN 13: 9780674166783
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256