Why do we feel justified in using adjectives such as romantic, erotic, heroic, melancholic, and a hundred others when speaking about music? How do we locate these meanings within particular musical styles? These are questions that have occupied Derek Scott's thoughts and driven his critical musicological research for many years. In this selection of essays, dating from 1995-2010, he returns time and again to examining how conventions of representation arise and how they become established. Among the themes of the collection are social class, ideology, national identity, imperialism, Orientalism, race, the sacred and profane, modernity and postmodernity, and the vexed relationship of art and entertainment. A wide variety of musical styles is discussed, ranging from jazz and popular song to the symphonic repertoire and opera.
Music at the Limits is the first book to bring together three decades of Edward W. Said's essays and articles on music. Addressing the work of a variety of composers, musicians, and performers, Said carefully draws out music's social, political, and cultural contexts and, as a classically trained pianist, provides rich and often surprising assessments of classical music and opera. Said saw music as a reflection of his ideas on literature and history and paid close attention to its composition and creative possibilities. Eloquent and surprising, Music at the Limits preserves an important dimension of Said's brilliant intellectual work and cements his reputation as one of the most influential and groundbreaking scholars of the twentieth century.
The nineteen interdisciplinary essays assembled in WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES I were first presented in 1997 at the founding conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) in Graz, Austria. Diverse in subject matter, theoretical orientation, critical approach, and interpretive strategy, they share a keen scholarly interest in contemporary word-music reflection. Registering the impact of cultural studies on word-music relations, as manifested in the 'new musicology' and other 'historicist' approaches, the volume aims to assess the entire field of word and music studies, to define its subject, objectives, and methodology and to describe the field's state of the art. Within the broader context of generic, structural, performative, and ideological considerations concerning the manifold interrelations between literature and music, contributors explore wide-ranging topics, such as the vexing question of terminology (e.g. 'word and music', 'melopoetics', 'interart', 'intermedial', 'transmedial'); inquiry into the meaning, narrative potential, and verbalization of music; analysis of texted music (the Lied and opera) and instrumental music; and discussion of individual issues (e.g. 'ekphrasis', 'musicalization of fiction', 'word music', and 'verbal music') and interart loanwords (e.g. 'narrativity', 'counterpoint', and 'leitmotif').
Edward W. Said (1935–2003) ranks as one of the most preeminent public intellectuals of our time. Through his literary criticism, his advocacy for the Palestinian cause, and his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Said elegantly enriched public discourse by unsettling the status quo. This indispensable volume, the most comprehensive and wide-ranging resource on Edward Said’s life and work, spans his broad legacy both within and beyond the academy. The book brings together contributions from thirty-one luminaries—leading scholars, critics, writers, and activists—to engage Said’s provocative ideas. Their essays and interviews explore the key themes of emancipation and representation through the prisms of postcolonial theory, literature, music, philosophy, and cultural studies. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, Ben Conisbee Baer, Daniel Barenboim, Timothy Brennan, Noam Chomsky, Denise DeCaires-Narain, Nicholas Dirks, Marc H. Ellis, Rokus de Groot, Sabry Hafez, Abdirahman A. Hussein, Ardi Imseis, Adel Iskandar, Ghada Karmi, Katherine Callen King, Joseph Massad, W. J. T. Mitchell, Laura Nader, Ilan Pappe, Benita Parry, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Jahan Ramazani, Jacqueline Rose, Lecia Rosenthal, Hakem Rustom, Avi Shlaim, Ella Habiba Shohat, Robert Spencer, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Asha Varadharajan, Michael Wood
This title was first publushed in 2000. Phyllis Weliver investigates representations of female musicians in British novels from 1860 to 1900 with regard to changing gender roles, musical practices and scientific discourses. During this time women were portrayed in complex and nuanced ways as they played and sang in family drawing rooms. Women in the 19th century were judged on their manners, appearance, language and other accomplishments such as sewing or painting, but music stood out as an area where women were encouraged to take centre stage and demonstrate their genteel education, graceful movements and self-expression. However within the novels of the Victorian were begining to move away from portraying the musical accomplishments of middle- and upper-class women as feminine and worthwhile towards depicting musical women as truly dangerous. This book explores the reasons for this reaction and the way labels and images were constructed to show extremes of behaviour, and it looks at whether the fiction was depicting the real trends in music at the time.
Edward Said is widely recognized for his work as a critic and theorist of Orientalism and the Palestine crisis, but far less attention has been devoted to his considerable body of literary and cultural criticism. In this edited collection, the contributors - many among the foremost Said scholars in the world - examine Said as the literary critic; his relationship to other major contemporary thinkers (including Derrida, Ricoeur, Barthes and Bloom); and his involvement with major movements and concerns of his time (such as music, Feminism, New Humanism, and Marxism). Featuring freshly carved out essays on new areas of intervention, the volume is an indispensable addition for those interested in Edward Said and the many areas in which his legacy looms.
The present volume meets a frequently expressed demand as it is the first collection of all the relevant essays and articles which Steven Paul Scher has written on Literature and Music over a period of almost forty years in the field of Word and Music Studies. Scher, The Daniel Webster Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, is one of the founding fathers of Word and Music Studies and a leading authority in what is in the meantime a well-established intermedial field. He has published very widely in a variety of journals and collections of essays, which until now have not always been easy to lay one's hands on. His work covers a wide range of subjects and comprises theoretical, methodological and historical studies, which include discussions of Ferruccio Busoni, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Judith Weir, the Talking Heads and many others and which pay special attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism. The range and depth of these studies have made him the 'mastermind' of Word and Music Studies who has defined the basic aims and objectives of the discipline. This volume is of interest to literary scholars and musicologists as well as comparatists and all those concerned about the rapidly expanding field of Intermedia Studies.
One of the late twentieth century’s most celebrated and influential public intellectuals, Edward W. Said was also a critic of astonishing range. This book presents his insightful and elegant analyses of four major operas—originally delivered as the Empson Lectures at Cambridge University in 1997—showcasing the power of Said’s critical acumen to unsettle canonical interpretations. In close readings of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Said explores how each opera engages with the social and political questions of their own eras—and how they might speak to the present. He pays careful attention to the works’ historical context as well as the possibilities they open for contemporary reinterpretations, examining the tension between opera’s cultural prestige and its potential for subversion. Said considers the representation of national identity, class, and exoticism, and he shows how cultural and literary studies can enrich understandings of operatic texts and performance. Lucid and gracefully written, Said on Opera enlivens well-known works with fresh insights and demonstrates the breadth of Said’s contributions to cultural criticism. This book features an introduction by the editor, Wouter Capitain, who situates these essays in the context of Said’s career, and a foreword by the acclaimed opera director Peter Sellars, who offers a masterful appreciation of Said’s achievements.