Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship

This major essay collection takes a fresh look at how differences among people matter for music and musical thought.

Olivia Bloechl (Edited by), Melanie Lowe (Edited by), Jeffrey Kallberg (Edited by)

9781107026674, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 January 2015

450 pages, 23 b/w illus. 49 music examples
25.3 x 18 x 2.5 cm, 1.06 kg

Two decades after the publication of several landmark scholarly collections on music and difference, musicology has largely accepted difference-based scholarship. This collection of essays by distinguished contributors is a major contribution to this field, covering the key issues and offering an array of individual case studies and methodologies. It also grapples with the changed intellectual landscape since the 1990s. Criticism of difference-based knowledge has emerged from within and outside the discipline, and musicology has had to confront new configurations of difference in a changing world. This book addresses these and other such challenges in a wide-ranging theoretical introduction that situates difference within broader debates over recognition and explores alternative frameworks, such as redistribution and freedom. Voicing a range of perspectives on these issues, this collection reveals why differences and similarities among people matter for music and musical thought.

List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: rethinking difference Olivia Bloechl, with Melanie Lowe
2. He said, she said? Men hearing women in Medicean Florence Suzanne G. Cusick
3. Race, empire, and early music Olivia Bloechl
4. What Mr Jefferson didn't hear Bonnie Gordon
5. Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn's instrumental music Melanie Lowe
6. Different masculinities: androgyny, effeminacy, and sentiment in Rossini's La donna del lago Heather Hadlock
7. Composing racial difference in Madama Butterfly: tonal language and the power of Cio-Cio-San Judy Tsou
8. Maurice Ravel's Chants populaires and the exotic within Sindhumathi Revuluri
9. 'Diving into the Earth': the musical worlds of Julius Eastman Ellie M. Hisama
10. Synthesizing difference: the queer circuits of early synthpop Judith Peraino
11. 'Pranksta rap': humor as difference in hip hop Charles Hiroshi Garrett
12. Race and the aesthetics of vocal timbre Nina Sun Eidsheim
13. Beneath difference: or, humanistic evolutionism Gary Tomlinson
14. Difference unthought Jairo Moreno
Index.

Subject Areas: Music: styles & genres [AVG], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Theory of music & musicology [AVA]