Explore the vast range of titles available.

We often say that music is ineffable, that it does not refer to anything outside of itself. But if music, in all its sensuous flux, does not mean anything in particular, might it still have a special kind of philosophical significance? In Deep Refrains, Michael Gallope draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music's ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music's ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music's ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music's stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.

This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

Bloch came to envision the Sacred Service to be performed as an integral whole, without breaks for reading from Scripture, a sermon and so forth, as would be the norm in a synagogue service. The traditional melodies of the synagogue are mostly non-metric modes assigned to various subsections, with a few traditional melodies for certain components. Bloch's music, however, does reflect certain qualities of the traditional music of the synagogue, using repeating motives, and establishing an effect similar to the non-metric traditional modes by frequent changes in time signature. The Cantor-Choir responsive structure also reflects a prominent feature of the Synagogue, as is the alternation between non-metric and highly rhythmic responses, and between biblical verses and non-biblical liturgical passages. Bloch departed from the prior practice of most composers of Synagogue music, who wrote settings of individual prayers or sections of the service.

[...]Muñoz had already started to develop and present on this project before the publication of his first book, Disidentifications (1999).3 With Muñoz's passing, Chambers-Letson and Nyong'o were tasked in finalizing a draft still in development that drew from about fifteen years of Muñoz's writing. Undoubtedly, links, overlaps, and divergences like this will lead to important conversations about the fluctuating definitions of Brown—a discussion that is itself bound in politics of race, ethnicity, and skin color that Brownness invokes. If Brownness results from what Muñoz (after John Dewey) refers to as a shared sense of harm, then it is not strictly fixed to the experience of U.S. Latinxs and is instead more broadly discerned in the experiences of minoritarian subjects at large. [...]the congruency between experiences of minoritarian subjects has the potential to extend beyond a state of affliction, as Muñoz sees in it an opportunity for collectivity and resistance. [...]Muñoz sees the Brown commons as a recognition of difference to U.S. affective norms and a persistent commitment to social transformation.

The 1930s saw an unusually rich harvest of violin concertos. An examination of this group of works provides a singular and seldom-considered angle from which to view the music history of the interwar period. In spite of the widely divergent styles and personal approaches, the works are united by certain factors that result from the choice of genre, with an attendant set of historical and technical constraints. In addition, the violinists who commissioned and performed the concertos influenced the compositions to a greater extent than often realized; therefore, in order to understand the works, we must take into consideration the artistic personalities of the respective performers as well. Many of the concertos were written for a new type of soloist, mostly from the younger generation, who had made a firm commitment to new music – something that some superstar violinists were unwilling to do. The concertos offer good opportunities to study the relationships between composer and performer, still a somewhat neglected topic in musicological studies.

Why are some of the most beloved and frequently performed works of the late-romantic period—Mahler, Delius, Debussy, Sibelius, Puccini—regarded by many critics as perhaps not quite of the first rank? Why has modernist discourse continued to brand these works as overly sentimental and emotionally self-indulgent? Peter Franklin takes a close and even-handed look at how and why late-romantic symphonies and operas steered a complex course between modernism and mass culture in the period leading up to the Second World War. The style’s continuing popularity and its domination of the film music idiom (via work by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and their successors) bring late-romantic music to thousands of listeners who have never set foot in a concert hall. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music sheds new light on these often unfairly disparaged works and explores the historical dimension of their continuing role in the contemporary sound world.

In Ernst Bloch's Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Moir challenges perceptions of Bloch as a naïve utopian thinker via a close contextualised reading of his speculative materialism.

This article analyzes the role of music in the negotiation of Scottish-Jewish identity in early twentieth-century Glasgow through the lives and work of Isaac Hirshow (1883-1956) and Meyer Fomin (1888-1960), cantors of Garnethill and South Portland Street synagogues, respectively. Both men were born in Vitebsk Guberniya, both established their reputations in Warsaw, and both moved to Glasgow in the early 1920s, remaining there for the rest of their lives. An analysis of these men's parallel journeys suggests a fruitful dialogue between their own backgrounds and the varied identities of their Scottish congregations. Drawing on archive materials, newspaper reports, and musical examples, I therefore explore the ways in which these cantors and their music were both metonymic of a real and known Eastern Europe for immigrant populations, but also metaphoric of an (often fondly) imagined Eastern Other to those for whom roots were often multiple. I then discuss in detail a number of musical texts created by the two men after their arrival in the United Kingdom: a series of commercial recordings made by Fomin in 1922, and a cantata written by Hirshow as part of his 1938 BMus degree. These texts capture a perspective that looks two ways at once—to the “tradition” and history of Eastern Europe, and to the modernity of the West and the acculturation of an immigrant experience. They thus speak to a moment of transition, simultaneously framing and problematizing discourses of authenticity as expressed through material cultural production.

Composer Ernest Bloch’s Jewish identity is ironically rooted in the notoriously anti-Semitic writings of Richard Wagner. Rather than an indication of self-loathing, Bloch’s assimilation of Wagner's ideas into his own thinking exemplifies the seductiveness of racial essentialist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An examination of the effects of racial essentialism and Jewish assimilation in post-Emancipation Europe puts Bloch’s identity as a Jewish composer in context. Next, a biographical sketch of Bloch’s life sheds light on how he grappled with Judaism in his music. Finally, a discussion of Bloch’s relationship with Judaism shows the danger of defining Jewish music in racial terms.

Vor dem Hintergrund der jüngsten Utopieverdrossenheit und -kritik wird hier der Versuch unternommen, an Ernst Blochs Hoffnungsphilosophie und seine Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins zu erinnern. Diese Rückschau ist keineswegs nostalgisch gemeint, sondern prospektiv und kritisch. Denn der Materialwert der Blochschen Ästhetik ist noch längst nicht ausgeschöpft und sein erweiterter Utopiebegriff noch nicht ausreichend für unser Verständnis der Moderne erkannt und genutzt. Das mag daran liegen, daß Blochs erweiterter Utopiebegriff vielen zu unbestimmt und vage erscheint. Doch übersieht man dabei, daß utopisches Denken und antizipierende Imagination sich in der Moderne von der Gattung Utopie gelöst haben. Ihre farbenfrohen Gegenbilder verblaßten, um als satirischer Stil, idyllische Versatzstücke oder utopische Augenblicke in der modernen Literatur wieder aufzutauchen. Diese Veränderung des Utopiebegriffs stellt auch die Literaturwissenschaft vor neue Aufgaben. Die Aufsatzsammlung beschäftigt sich mit der Vielfalt und Weite von Blochs „Enzyklopädie der Hoffnung“, deren utopische Methode und „Ästhetik des Vor-Scheins“ auf Texte des 18. und 20. Jahrhunderts angewandt werden. Die Ergebnisse des Buches werden in einem abschließenden Kapitel „Zur Begriffsgeschichte der Utopie“ zusammengefaßt.