The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism - Hardcover

Harry Haskell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691026416 ISBN 13: 9780691026411

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1996

Synopsis

This historical anthology shows the evolution of music journalism and its place in Western culture over the past three centuries and illustrates the richness, variety, and vitality of music criticism as both an intellectual enterprise and a literary genre. Because little music criticism in foreign languages is accessible to English-speaking readers, Harry Haskell has made a special point of exemplifying regional traditions of critical writing from throughout the Western world. Included in The Attentive Listener are articles not only from England, Western Europe, and the United States, but also from Russia, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Latin America, and Canada. Each of the one hundred articles here relates to one or more topics of central importance in music history, such as the nature of musical taste and criticism, operatic reform, cultural nationalism, the value of tradition, and the impact of modern technologies on composers, performers, and audiences. The Attentive Listener differs from previous anthologies of musical writings in its emphasis on journalistic criticism, its broadly international scope, and the thematic organization of the articles, most of which have not been translated or anthologized before. The writers represented include not only professional critics and scholars but also composers such as Debussy, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Janacek, and Virgil Thomson, and literary figures such as Heine, Boito, and Shaw.

About this title

About the Author

Harry Haskell, the author of The Early Music Revival: A History, is the music editor of Yale University Press. From 1977 through 1984 he was music editor of the Kansas City Star.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691026416
• ISBN 13: 9780691026411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 415