Conventional Wisdom

by McClary, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780520232082
• ISBN10: 0520232089
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

With her usual combination of erudition, innovation, and spirited prose, Susan McClary reexamines the concept of musical convention in this fast-moving and refreshingly accessible book. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge,Conventional Wisdomoffers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues.McClary looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves easily across a broad range of repertoires--the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap. As one of the most influential trailblazers in contemporary musical understanding, McClary once again moves beyond the borders of the "purely musical" into the larger world of history and society, and beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a musical pluralism. Those who know McClary only as a feminist writer will discover her many other sides, but not at the expense of gender issues, which are smoothly integrated into the general argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling the story of Western music,Conventional Wisdombravely tackles big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.

Author Biography

Susan Mcclary is Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, She received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Turtles All the Way Down (On the ``Purely Musical'')	1	(31)
Thinking Blues	32	(31)
What Was Tonality?	63	(46)
The Refuge of Counterconvention	109	(30)
Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition	139	(32)
Notes	171	(26)
Index	197