Sound Judgment

Richard Leppert is Regents Professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. His research addresses the relations of music, imagery and associated practices to social and cultural formation, principally revolving around issues of gender, class and race in Europe and America from early modernity to the present.

Contents: Introduction. Part I Aurality: On reading Adorno hearing Schubert; Opera, aesthetic violence, and the imposition of modernity: Fitzcarraldo; 'Everybody's lonesome for somebody': age, the body, and experience in the music of Hank Williams (co-authored with George Lipsitz); Gender sonics: the voice of Patsy Cline. Part II Visuality: The prodigal son: Teniers and Ghezzi; Concert in a House: musical iconography and musical thought; Imagery, musical confrontation and cultural difference in early 18th-century London; Male agony: awakening conscience; The musician of the imagination. Part III Practice: Music teachers of upper-class amateur musicians in 18th-century England; Music and the body: dance, power, submission. Part IV Utopia: Nature and exile: Adorno, Mahler and the appropriation of kitsch; Four hands, once again [by Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Jonathan Wipplinger]; Four hands, three hearts: a commentary: Music 'pushed to the edge of existence' (Adorno, listening, and the question of hope); Index.