Music and Society
The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception

A provocative volume of essays challenging the view that music occupies an autonomous aesthetic sphere.

Richard Leppert (Edited by), Susan McClary (Edited by)

9780521379779, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 15 June 1989

224 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

' … most rewarding … As a collection of humanistic scholarship that amplifies the best sociological tradition … it is highly recommended.' Contemporary Sociology

This provocative volume of essays is now available in paperback. The contributors to this volume - musicologists, sociologists, cultural theorists - all challenge the view that music occupies an autonomous aesthetic sphere. Recently, socially and politically grounded enterprises such as feminism, semiotics and deconstruction have effected a major transformation in the ways in which the arts and humanities are studied, leading in turn to a systematic investigation of the implicit assumptions underlying the critical methods of the last two hundred years. Influenced by these approaches, the writers here question a prevailing ideology that insists there is a division between music and society and examine the ways in which the two do in fact interact and mediate one another within and across socio-cultural boundaries.

List of illustrations
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Foreword: the ideology of autonomous art Janet Wolff
1. The blasphemy of talking politics Bach Year Susan McClary
2. Music, domestic life and cultural chauvinism: images of British subjects at home in India Richard Leppert
3. On grounding Chopin Rose Rosengard Subotnik
4. Towards an aesthetic of popular music Simon Frith
5. Music and male hegemony John Shepherd
6. The sound of music in the era of its electronic reproducibility John Mowitt
Index.

Subject Areas: Western "classical" music [AVGC]