Making Sense of Music

· Oxford University Press
Ebook
344
Pages
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More

About this ebook

One of the best-known prose stylists in contemporary musicology, Susan McClary brings together a fascinating set of essays in Making Sense of Music that focus on temporality and the body as ways of understanding music. Prefaced by a Foreword from celebrated theatre director Peter Sellars, the chapters engage variously with ribald songs of the Renaissance, the performance of Bach fugues, time-bending in seventeenth-century keyboard works, Grieg's Norwegian swerve, Florence Price's reclaiming of the spiritual, erotic scenarios in Mahler, representations of motherhood in Kaija Saariaho's operas, and queer elements in classical and popular repertories. McClary grounds her readings within the specifics of historical time and place, even as she shows how the music itself relies on gesture and the body. In sum, this book demonstrates in case studies taken from a wide variety of practices how music draws upon and shapes human subjective experience.

About the author

Susan McClary (Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) specializes in the cultural criticism of music. Her books include Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality; Georges Bizet: Carmen; Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form; Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal; Reading Music; Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music; Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture; The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music. She previously taught at University of Minnesota, McGill, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. McClary received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship in 1995, and her work has been translated into at least twenty languages.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.