Music reviews and criticism

Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.

Feasting and Fasting in Opera shows that the consumption of food and drink is an essential component of opera, both on and off stage.

Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one.

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted.

Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today.

Though many well-known German philosophers have devoted considerable attention to music and its aesthetics, surprisingly few of their writings on the subject have been translated into English.

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them.

In this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society.

In the late sixteenth century, the French royal court was mobile.

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic-a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance.

Opera often seems to arouse either irrational enthusiasm or visceral dislike.

Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture.

Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England.

New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new way of configuring jazz music and history.

London, 1820.

From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800.

In the early 1800s, Rossini's operas permeated Italy, from the opera house to myriad arrangements heard in public and private.

Film has shaped modern society in part by changing its cultures of memory.

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse.

Does it make sense to refer to bird song-a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate-as art?

In this unique and hybrid book, cultural and music historian Michael P.

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music?

In New York and London during World War I, the performance of lieder-German art songs-was roundly prohibited, representing as they did the music and language of the enemy.

We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look-from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein's creation, and from Louise Brooks's exaggerated acting in Pandora's Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper.

For premodern audiences, poetic form did not exist solely as meter, stanzas, or rhyme scheme.

A close-up exploration of the role of the rhythm section in jazz ensemblers This fresh look at the neglected rhythm section in jazz ensembles shows that the improvisational interplay among drums, bass, and piano is just as innovative, complex, and spontaneous as the solo.

From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragedie en musique).

The Low Countries were at the heart of innovation in Europe in the fifteenth century.

We often say that music is ineffable, that it does not refer to anything outside of itself.

Franz Schubert's song cycles Schone Mullerin and Winterreise are cornerstones of the genre.

In music studies, Timothy D.

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous-and enormously influential-dialogue with their subject.

What does it mean to hear scientifically?

In this book, Emily Wilbourne boldly traces the roots of early opera back to the sounds of the commedia dell'arte.

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes.

This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou?

A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years.

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn's career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven's, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall.

Early seventeenth-century Italy saw a revolution in instrumental music.

One of the twentieth century's greatest composers, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) virtually stopped writing music during the last thirty years of his life.

The German-American relationship was special long before the Cold War; it was rooted not simply in political actions, but also long-term traditions of cultural exchange that date back to the nineteenth century.

In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic.

This is a groundbreaking study of the prestigious Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics during the Third Reich.

Opera and musical theater dominated French culture in the 1800s, and the influential stage music that emerged from this period helped make Paris, as Walter Benjamin put it, the "e;capital of the nineteenth century.

Jazz is born of collaboration, improvisation, and listening.

If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you'll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format.

The triumph of avant-gardes in the 1920s tends to dominate our discussions of the music, art, and literature of the period.

The Jazz Age.

Siena, blessed with neither the aristocratic nor the ecclesiastical patronage enjoyed by music in other northern Italian centers like Florence, nevertheless attracted first-rate composers and performers from all over Europe.