Interpreting Music / Edition 1

by Lawrence Kramer

Overview

Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—“interpreting music” in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer 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. Kramer 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. The book 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520267053
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/02/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of Music and English at Fordham University. He is the author of many books, including Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History; Opera and Modern Culture; and Why Classical Music Still Matters, all from UC Press.

Table of Contents

Contents
List of Musical Examples

1. Hermeneutics
2. Language
3. Subjectivity
4. Meaning
5. Metaphor
6. History
7. Influence
8. Deconstruction
9. Analysis
10. Resemblance
11. Things
12. Classical
13. Modern
14. Works
15. Performance
16. Musicology

Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Well documented. . . . Recommended."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

Thoughtful and thought-provoking. . . . All present are the qualities noted of Kramer’s impeccable writing: grace, deftness of touch, wide reading.

Music & Letters - Michael Spitzer

"Thoughtful and thought-provoking. . . . All present are the qualities noted of Kramer's impeccable writing: grace, deftness of touch, wide reading."--Music & Letters

"Well documented. . . . Recommended."--Choice

From the Publisher

Well documented. . . . Recommended.

Choice