Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form
Susan McClary
Abstract
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 ... More
Keywords: musical convention, musical practices, social knowledge, musical history, tonality, blues, eighteenth-century music, late Beethoven, rap, musical pluralism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2000 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520221062 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520221062.001.0001 |
