Theodor Adorno

Richard Leppert

"A book of landmark importance. It is unprecedented in its design: a brilliantly selected group of essays on music coupled with lucid, deeply incisive, and in every way masterly analysis of Adorno's thinking about music. No one who studies Adorno and music will be able to dispense with it; and if they can afford only one book on Adorno and music, this will be the one. For in miniature, it contains everything one needs: a collection of exceptionally important writings on all the principal aspects of music and musical life with which Adorno dealt; totally reliable scholarship; and powerfully illuminating commentary that will help readers at all levels read and re-read the essays in question."—Rose Rosengard Subotnik, author of Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society "An invaluable contribution to Adorno scholarship, with well chosen essays on composers, works, the culture industry, popular music, kitsch, and technology. Leppert's introduction and commentaries are consistently useful; his attention to secondary literature remarkable; his interpretation responsible. The new translations by Susan Gillespie (and others) are outstanding not only for their care and readability, but also for their sensitivity to Adorno's forms and styles."—Lydia Goehr, author of The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy "With its careful, full edition of Adorno's important musical texts and its exhaustive yet eminently readable commentaries, Richard Leppert's magisterial book represents a brilliant solution to the age-old dilemma of bringing together primary text and interpretation in one volume."—James Deaville, Director, School of the Arts, McMaster University "The developing variations of Adorno's life-long involvement with musical themes are fully audible in this remarkable collection. What might be called his 'literature on notes' brilliantly complements the 'notes to literature' he devoted to the written word. Richard Leppert's superb commentaries constitute a book-length contribution in their own right, which will enlighten and challenge even the most learned of Adorno scholars."—Martin Jay, author of The Dialectical Imagination: A History of The Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research "There is afoot in Anglo-American musicology today the first wholesale reconsideration of Adorno's thought since the pioneering work of Rose Rosengard Subotnik around 1980. Essays on Music will play a central role in this effort. It will do so because Richard Leppert has culled Adorno's writings so as to make clear to musicologists the place of music in the broad critique of modernity that was Adorno's overarching project; and it will do so because Leppert has explained these writings, in commentaries that amount to a book-length study, so as to reveal to non-musicologists the essentially musical foundation of this project. No one interested in Adorno from any perspective—or, for that matter, in modernity and music all told—can afford to ignore Essays on Music."—Gary Tomlinson, author of Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera "This book is both a major achievement by its author-editor and a remarkable act of scholarly generosity for the rest of us. Until now, English translations of Adorno's major essays on music have been scattered and often unreliable. Until now, there has been no comprehensive scholarly treatment of Adorno's musical thinking. This volume remedies both problems at a single stroke. It will be read equally—and eagerly—for Adorno's texts and for Richard Leppert's commentary on them, both of which will continue to be essential resources as musical scholarship seeks increasingly to come to grips with the social contexts and effects of music. No one knows Adorno better than Leppert, and no one is better equipped to clarify the complex interweaving of sociology, philosophy, and musical aesthetics that is central to Adorno's work. From now on, everyone who reads Adorno on music, whether a beginner or an expert, is in Richard Leppert's debt for devoting his exceptional gifts of learning and lucidity to this project."—Lawrence Kramer, author of Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History

Essays on Music

Richard D. Leppert

"[Leppert's] originality is immensely encouraging to those of us who are convinced that musicology is undergoing a paradigmatic change."—Derek B. Scott, author of The Singing Bourgeois "A wonderfully stimulating book. . . . Will be of great importance to musicologists and students of culture generally."—Ruth Solie, editor of Musicology and Difference

Music, Representation, and the History of the Body

The Sight of Sound

Nü; Bati Dünyasi Modernite Dönemi Sanatinda Bedenin Kültürel Retorigi

Lawrence Kramer

Daniel Goldmark

"Put briefly, this is a superb collection of essays. They are lucidly and eloquently written, and make their points with wit and clarity. They are full of perceptive, highly stimulating, and occasionally provocative illustrations of how practice connects to theory (and vice versa) without getting bogged down in academic language. The contributors include a combination of exceptionally admired film music scholars, and of musicologists renowned for their keen insights into the cultural contexts of music production and reception. This book is an excellent resource and compelling read."—Derek B. Scott, author of From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology

Representing Music in Cinema

Beyond the Soundtrack

This book examines Western European and American art from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. It discusses how meaning accrues to images and what role vision and visuality play in the history of modernity and explores art's relation to the material world.

The Cultural Functions of Imagery

Art and the Committed Eye

Susan McClary

A provocative volume of essays challenging the view that music occupies an autonomous aesthetic sphere.

The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception

Music and Society

Examining Western European and American art from the 15th century to the 20th, this book studies the complex relation between the "look" of images and the variety of social and cultural uses to which they are put.

The Cultural Functions Of Imagery

Art And The Committed Eye

In Art and the Committed Eye Richard Leppert examines Western European and American art from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. He studies the complex relation between the "look" of images and the variety of social and cultural uses to which they are put and demonstrates that the meaning of any image is significantly determined by its function, which changes over time. In particular, he emphasizes the ways in which visual culture is called on to mediate social differences defined by gender, class, and race. In , Leppert addresses the nature and task of representation, discussing how meaning accrues to images and what role vision and visuality play in the history of modernity. Here he explains imagery's power to attract our gaze by triggering desire and focuses on the long history of the use of representation to enact a deception, whether in painting or advertising. explores art's relation to the material world, to the ways in which images mark our various physical and psychic ties to objects. The author analyzes still life paintings whose subject matter is both extraordinarily diverse and deeply paradoxical—from flower bouquets to grotesque formal arrangements of human body parts. Leppert demonstrates that even in "innocent" still lifes, formal design and technical execution are imbued with cultural conflict and social power. is devoted to the representation of the human body—as subject to obsessive gazing and as an object of display, spectacle, and transgression. The variety of body representation is enormous: pleased or tortured, gorgeous or monstrous, modest or lascivious, powerful or weak, in the bloom of life or under the anatomist's knife, clothed or naked. But it is the sexual body, Leppert shows, that has provided the West with its richest, most complex, contradictory, conflicted, and paradoxical accounts of human identity in relation to social ideals.

Richard Leppert

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