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Edward T. Cone was one of the most important and influential music critics of the twentieth century. He was also a master lecturer skilled at conveying his ideas to broad audiences.Hearing and Knowing Musiccollects fourteen essays that Cone gave as talks in his later years and that were left unpublished at his death. Edited and introduced by Robert Morgan, these essays cover a broad range of topics, including music's position in culture, musical aesthetics, the significance of opera as an art, setting text to music, the nature of twentieth-century harmony and form, and the practice of musical analysis. Fully matching the quality and style of Cone's published writings, these essays mark a critical addition to his work, developing new ideas, such as the composer as critic; clarifying and modifying older positions, especially regarding opera and the nature of sung utterance; and adding new and often unexpected insights on composers and ideas previously discussed by Cone. In addition, there are essays, such as one on Debussy, that lead Cone into areas he had not previously examined.Hearing and Knowing Musicrepresents the final testament of one of our most important writers on music.

It is a common article of faith that Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know. But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? InMozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace. Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

[...]he spent 18 years working on \"The Beautiful Music All Around Us,\" which tells of 13 performances that were part of Library of Congress field recordings and the stories behind the music and the people who made it. Wade lives with his wife near Washington and is in residence at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which has an American roots music program.\\n

[...]when the Library of Congress issued its recordings in a landmark series, \"Folk Music of the United States,\" the song texts remained the focus, exhaustively analyzed in the scholarly booklets that accompanied the albums, compiled by genre.

The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping?All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic\" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering network called “Echelon.\" Together with this archeology of auditory surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft’s representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing\" that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing\" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

Print – and by extension, visuality – has historically dominated the literary, artistic, and academic spheres in Canada; however, scholars and artists have become increasingly attuned to the creative and scholarly opportunities offered by paying attention to sound. Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound turns to a particular opportunity, interrogating the ways that sonic practices act as forms of aesthetic and political dissent. Chapters explore, on the one hand, critical methods of engaging with sound – particularly bodies of literary and artistic work in their specific materiality as read, recited, performed, mediated, archived, and remixed objects; on the other hand, they also engage with creative practices that mobilize sound as a political aesthetic, taking on questions of identity, racialization, ability, mobility, and surveillance. Divided into nine pairings that bring together works originating in oral/aural forms with works originating in writing, the book explores the creative and critical output of leading sonic practitioners. It showcases diverse approaches to the equally complex formations of sound, resistance, and community, bridging the too-often separate worlds of the practical and the academic in generative, resonant dialogue. Combining the oral and the written, the creative and the critical, and the mediated and the live, Resistant Practices in Communities of Sound asks us to attune ourselves as listeners as well as readers.

German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel problematized the term “aesthetics” in his writings on art. This article attempts to capture the tension between Hegel's theory of art and philosophy of art and its impact on the subsequent theorization of art in the twentieth century as consumer or emancipatory. Music, poetry and plastic arts seem to resonate differently with philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Adorno. Plato considered music soothing to the soul. In Aristotle, one could trace the oblique beginnings of the tension between a theory of art and a philosophy of art as he questioned the role of art in philosophy. While Kant's approach is more formal and deals with concepts such as beauty, sublime, genius, and the status of aesthetic objects, Hegel grapples with the rational and emotional aspects of works of art which determine whether art is free or under the thralldom of nature. Both Kant and Hegel distinguished artistic from natural beauty. Critical theorists such as Adorno were also influenced by Hegel. Adorno's analysis of concepts such as mimesis forms an important part of his critique of culture industry. Adorno was also emphatic that classical art could only exist as a product of an epoch. Yet in its dialectical form, art serves as a critique of ideology. Progressively, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, what began as a crevice between a philosophy of art and a theory of art became a chasm. Thus, begins a contentious relationship between art as a pursuit in itself and art for consumption, that is, art as an integral aspect of consumer culture. The new phenomenon of AI art also poses interesting questions about the paradigmatic shift in dynamics between human element and technology. This article would also attempt to trace how art continues to defy reification, while in the process being consumed constantly, recreating and reinventing itself.

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows howLes Contes d'Hoffmannsummed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject. Les Contes d'Hoffmannis also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas andopéra-comiques.Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the \"mad loves\" that driveLes Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself.

Neo-Riemannian theory offers an auspicious toolkit for analyzing film music—a repertoire in which dramatic exigency takes precedence over functional tonal logic. The ability of neo-Riemannian theory to model harmonic progressions as dynamic and contextually determined, particularly with association-laden chromatic motions, suits it eminently to Hollywood scoring practice. This transformational approach is tested on James Horner’s music for the film A Beautiful Mind. In this score, Horner illustrates the mental life of the mathematician John Nash with wildly chromatic but firmly triadic music. A group generated by the operators L, R, and S provides the transformational fount for a “Genius complex” that represents intense intellection. Three cues from A Beautiful Mind are analyzed. Collectively, their tonal spaces reveal a distinctly transformational contribution to narrative and characterization. These readings further evince a tension between the logical teleology of sequential patterning with the radically contingent, even game-like quality of Horner’s triadic manipulations.