Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics

by Jann Pasler

Overview

Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations. The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural and philosophical issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holm?s, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the complex cultural and political networks in which music participates. This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage with music in fresh and exciting ways. In these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive as a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into how we negotiate the world. Jann Pasler's Writing through Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical lens to focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190295929
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/12/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jann Pasler, music scholar, documentary filmmaker, and pianist, is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where she founded the graduate program Critical Studies and Experimental Practices (CSEP). She has published widely on French and American contemporary music, modernism and postmodernism, cultural life in France and the French colonies. Recent books: Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France and, as editor/author, Saint-Sa?ns and his World. She is currently completing Music, Race, and Colonialism in the French Empire, 1860s--1950s as well as a book, in French, on music ethnography from Indochina to Central Africa.

Table of Contents

Foreword by George E. Lewis Introduction Part I: Time, Narrative, and Memory 1. Narrative and Narrativity in Music 2. Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory 3. Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents Part II: Self-Fashioning 4. Deconstructing d'Indy, or the Problem of the Composer's Reputation 5. New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Cocteau's Identity 6. Inventing a Tradition: John Cage's "Composition in Retrospect" Part III: Identity and Nation 7. Pell?as and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera 8. The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holm's 9. Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the "Yellow Peril" Part IV: Patrons and Patronage 10. Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation 11. The Political Economy of Composition in the American University, 1965-1985 Part V: The Everyday Life of the Past 12. Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology 13. Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the "Popular" in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music Appendices Appendix 1. Definitions of Terminology Used in Chapter 1 Appendix 2. Public Performances and Publications of Music by Augusta Holm's Appendix 3. Relationship between NEA Support and Composers' Educational Background Appendix 4. Relationship between NEA Support and Composers' Institutional Affiliation Appendix 5. Educational Background and Institutional Affiliation of Most Frequent NEA Panelists Appendix 6. Winners of Largest NEA Composer Grants Each Year, 1973-1985 Index

Editorial Reviews

"The astonishingly wide-ranging and trenchant essays in Jann Pasler's Writing Through Music are united by their passionate engagement in the history, theory, and criticism of Modernist and Postmodernist musics. Pasler's stated aim-"to flesh out the contingencies and rich complexity of the particular moments in which music was conceived, created, performed, and heard," is admirably realized in this collection. Throughout, Pasler displays a dazzling command of scholarship and archival research, and she has assembled a wealth of materials that support her arguments. Reading Writing Through Music is an exhilarating experience."— Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

"Writing Through Music takes us into the deeper meanings of the world currents that flow in the vast non linear context of music. Pasler knows the music and she also knows that music involves much more than the sounds performers play. Music resounds as a profound force in global culture. She fearlessly investigates and finds the roots of major relationships through her scholarship and passion. I recognize my own living through music reflected in her enlightening article on composers. The writing also flows beautifully in each essay. The intelligence of Pasler's essays is the basis for a new musicology."— Pauline Oliveros, Composer

"Pasler helps us to see how 'doing things with music' (including writing about music) is social action, writ large....What makes Jann Pasler's work so special is that it combines finely grained historically located research with theoretical power and an anthropological focus - nothing is, in principle, peripheral to socio-musical study since everything is in principle, inter-related music and writing about music is a critical tool and one that activates and develops 'multiple layers of awareness'. In concentrating on the 'dialectical' relationship between music and extra-musical phenomena, Pasler illuminates music's importance in the world."— Tia DeNora, Professor of Sociology of Music and Director of Research, Sociology/Philosophy, University of Exeter

"Jann Pasler's Writing Through Music represents humanistic scholarship at its very best - an account of why music matters not only to musicians but to all of us, a powerful explanation of why her identifications as a woman and as a postmodernist should inflect her work."—Susan McClary, Professor of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Evocative and entertaining." —Music & Letters

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