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In a highly influential essay, Rose Rosengard Subotnik critiques “structural listening” as an attempt to situate musical meaning solely within the unfolding of the musical structure itself. The authors of this volume, prominent young music historians and theorists writing on repertories ranging from Beethoven to MTV, take up Subotnik's challenge. The chapters here explore not only the implications of the “structural listening” model but also the alternative listening strategies that have developed in specific communities, often in response to twentieth-century Western music.

This book challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, demonstrating how music can help forge a nation. Exploring the history of Third Republic France, the book shows how French people from all classes and political persuasions looked to music to revitalize the country after the turbulent crises of 1871. Embraced not as a luxury but for its “public utility,” music became an object of public policy as integral to modern life as power and water, a way to teach critical judgment and inspire national pride. It helped people to forget the past, voice conflicting aspirations, and imagine a shared future. Based on a survey of archival material, this interdisciplinary work looks beyond elites and the histories their agendas have dominated to open windows onto the musical tastes and practices of amateurs as well as professionals. A history of the period emerges, one rooted in political realities and the productive tensions between the political and the aesthetic. The book ignites broad debates about music's role in democracy and its meaning in our lives.

This book reexamines the concept of musical convention. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, it offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and the blues. The author looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves across a broad range of repertoires: the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap. The book moves beyond the borders of the “purely musical” into the larger world of history and society, and beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a musical pluralism. Gender issues are smoothly integrated into the general argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling the story of Western music, the author tackles issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.

This book gathers the author's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading intellectual journals. The works presented in this book consider contemporary composition and performance, the role of critics and historians in the life of the arts, and the fraught terrain where ethics and aesthetics interact and at times conflict. Many of the works collected here have themselves excited wide debate, including the title chapter, which considers the rights and obligations of artists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of postscripts written especially for this volume, the book addresses the debates which was stirred up by the author by his insisting that art is not a utopian escape and that artists inhabit the same world as the rest of society. Among the book's forty-two chapters are two public addresses—one about the prospects for classical music at the end of the second millennium C. E., the other a revisiting of the performance issues previously discussed in the author's Text and Act (1995)—that appear in print for the first time.

Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Grounded in the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing in telegraph lines and in the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard in telephone lines, the book moves through the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s, when the composer Alvin Lucier worked with the “natural electromagnetic sounds” present from “brainwaves to outer space,” through the urban electromagnetism in the conceptual art of Robert Barry, to the energy-scavenging drawings and antennas by the artist Joyce Hinterding. From the sounds of auroras at high latitudes and atmospheric electricity in the mountains to the underground music of earthquakes and nuclear explosions and to music bounced off the moon and the sounds of the sun, Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale through detailed discussions of artists and scientists such as Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Paul DeMarinis, Semiconductor, Thomas Ashcraft, Katie Paterson, Edmond Dewan, Ludwik Liszka, and many others.

Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application for the humanities. The models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world.

This book is a comprehensive discussion on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—“interpreting music” in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of work, it fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning—even the very concept of music—while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. The book argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation in general. It illustrates the many dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music, by working through music to wider philosophical and cultural questions.

This book argues that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. The book draws on a broad range of music and theory to show that the problem of musical meaning is not just an intellectual puzzle, but a musical phenomenon in its own right. How have romantic narratives involving Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata affected how we hear this famous piece, and what do they reveal about its music? How does John Coltrane's African American identity affect the way we hear him perform a relatively “white” pop standard like My Favorite Things? Why does music requiring great virtuosity have different cultural meanings to music that is not particularly virtuosic? Focusing on the classical repertoire from Beethoven to Shostakovich and also discussing jazz, popular music, and film and television music, the book uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. The book demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value.

What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? This book grapples directly with these fundamental questions—questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. In this third volume in a trilogy on musical understanding the author seeks answers in both thought about music and thought in music-thinking in tones. The book assesses musical scholarship in the aftermath of critical musicology and musical hermeneutics and in view of more recent concerns with embodiment, affect, and performance. The book challenges the prevailing conceptions of every topic it addresses: language, context, and culture; pleasure and performance; and, through music, the foundations of understanding in the humanities.

In this book, the author argues that the ubiquity of music in contemporary life has led to a different kind of listening, in which a range of listenings, across ranges of attention and affect, lead to the development of fields of distributed subjectivity. These fields are not limited to humans, but include what might once have been thought of as “objects” of study. The dynamic subjectivity posited here insists on fluidity and motion, on the shared nature of the subjectivity of music and scholar or listener, and on what once was considered stable features of subjects, that is, identities. Moreover, the formation of subjectivity in this sense is conditioned by all senses, but particularly by listening to sound and music, rejecting former visually and verbally based theories as insufficient.