Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 256 pages
- Published by: Harvard University Press August 26, 2006
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0674166787
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0674166783
-
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 12.8 ounces
Product Review
New York Times Book Review : Nothing less than a
Who's Who of musicology, and a
What's What of theory, analysis, and musical philosophy.
--Erich Leinsdorf
New York Review of Books : A masterly exposition of what Kennan views as the pivotal intellectual issues surrounding postwar musical studies--an exposition that even his critics would readily concede him to be uniquely qualified to undertake. Musicians of all sorts ought to view this as a challengeto give music the balanced critical attention it deserves.
--Robert Winter
Los Angeles Times Book Review : A gracefully polemical survey of "modern ideas and ideologies of music," in the course of which the author touches upon many aspects of music and musical life in the 20th centuryImportant and consistently stimulating.
--David Hamilton
Times Literary Supplement : A timely proposal, and one well worth investigating for anyone who is interested in music as a disciplineIt represents a useful, and indeed unique, attempt to map out in English the issues of our day.
--Christopher Wintle
Book Description
Contemplating Music is a book for all serious music lovers. Here is the first full-scale of ideas and ideologies in music over the past forty years; a period during which virtually every aspect of music was transformed.
With this book, Joesph 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 tradtionally 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 towarda critical orientation, As examples, he presents a fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950's and Beethoven studies in the 1960's. He sketched the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Miltion Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster's songs into the cannons 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.
Comtemplating Music is fulled with wisdom and trenchant commmentary. 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.
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