Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, New York, USA, and is an active composer.

Contents: Introduction; Selected bibliography; Tropes and windows: an outline of musical hermaneutics (1990); Decadence and desire: the 'Wilhelm Meister' songs of Wolf and Schubert; Dangerous Liaisons: the literary text in musical criticism; Music criticism and the postmodern turn: in contrary motion with Gary Tomlinson; Charging the Canons; The strange case of Beethoven's 'Coriolan' : romantic aesthetics, modern subjectivity, and the cult of Shakespeare; The harem threshold: Turkish music and Greek love in Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'; Primitive encounters: Beethoven's 'Tempest' sonata, musical meaning, and enlightenment anthropology; Tolstoy's Beethoven, Beethoven's Tolstoy: the Kreutzer sonata; Like falling leaves: the erotics of mourning in four drum taps settings; Chopin at the funeral: episodes in the history of modern death; Recognizing Schubert: musical subjectivity, cultural change and Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady; Haydn's chaos, Schenker's order; or, musical meaning and musical analysis: can they mix? ; ); Speaking melody, melodic speech; 'Longindying Call': of music, modernity, and the Sirens 'Au-delà d'une musique informelle': nostalgia, obsolescence, and the avant-garde; Index.