Writing through Music Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics

by Pasler, Jann

• ISBN13: 9780195324891
• ISBN10: 0195324897
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 Holmes, 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. Here, 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.

Author Biography

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 music, contemporary American music, modernism, and postmodernism. She recently completed Music as Public Utility, the first volume of her trilogy, Useful Music, or Why Music Mattered in Third Republic France forthcoming from University of California Press, and is currently working on Music, Race, and Colonialism in Fin-de-siecle France.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Introduction	p. 3
Time, Narrative, and Memory
Narrative and Narrativity in Music	p. 25
Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory	p. 49
Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents	p. 82
Self-Fashioning
Deconstructing d'Indy, or the Problem of a Composer's Reputation	p. 101
New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Cocteau's Identity	p. 140
Inventing a Tradition: John Cage's "Composition in Retrospect"	p. 162
Identity and Nation
Pelleas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera	p. 181
The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmes	p. 213
Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the "Yellow Peril"	p. 249
Patrons and Patronage
Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation	p. 285
The Political Economy of Composition in the American University, 1965-1985	p. 318
The Everyday Life of the Past
Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology	p. 365
Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the "Popular" in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music	p. 417
Appendices
Definitions of Terminology Used in Chapter 1	p. 451
Public Performances and Publications of Music by Augusta Holmes	p. 454
Relationship between NEA Support and Composers' Educational Background	p. 459
Relationship between NEA Support and Composers' Institutional Affiliation	p. 468
Educational Background and Institutional Affiliation of Most Frequent NEA Panelists	p. 480
Winners of Largest NEA Composer Grants Each Year, 1973-1985	p. 484
Index	p. 491
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