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In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes. Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.

Writing in 1962, Joseph Kerman was the first to speculate about potentially subversive political meanings in the Cantiones sacrae of the English Renaissance composer William Byrd, his two collections of motets published in 1589 and 1591, “voicing prayers, exhortations, and protests on behalf of the English Catholic community”. Subsequent research has corroborated Kerman’s speculations, showing that many of the texts Byrd set indeed feature the same politically charged metaphors that English Jesuit missionaries used to describe the predicament of Catholics living under the Protestant regime of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as that Byrd maintained close ties with many of these missionaries. In our own time, however, those who have analysed these motets, including Kerman, have paid little attention to this, preferring formal(ist) analytical approaches to this body of music. Focusing on Ne irascaris Domine, one of Byrd’s most famous “political” motets, and the only two major analytical responses to it, this article attempts to demonstrate the limitations of formalist music analysis when applied to Renaissance sacred music.

Day considers the significance of one distinguishable feature of an improvised jazz solo, how it ends, in light of Joseph Kerman's seemingly parallel consideration of the history of development of endings in classical concertos. Day proposes a counter-parallel between the jazz improviser's attitude toward the solo's end and Ludwig Wittgenstein's attitude toward our--or philosophy's--arriving at the end of justifications. Day concludes with an illustration of the jazz improviser's treatment of the solo's end that shows how that battle is waged and, in exemplary instances, won on the bandstand and in the studio.

Agawu presents a chronology citing major events in the development of American musicology since 1980. In that year, Joseph Kerman published \"How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,\" which harshly critiqued the field of music theory. Agawu suggests that analysis is a much more complex activity than certain institutional representations of it allow, and he aims to restate some of the most basic aspects of the practice. Although analysis is sometimes considered a branch of musicology, its affinities and structural parallels with performance and composition are more pertinent, and provide the most powerful justification for its continued cultivation. The case against analysis has been made in part by people who failed to recognize that analysis is ideally permanently open. A vision of music analysis that stresses its affinities with performance and composition differs from the critical-aesthetic program set out by Kerman.

In these essays, Roger Parker brings a series of valuable insights to bear on Verdian analysis and criticism, and does so in a way that responds both to an opera-goer's love of musical drama and to a scholar's concern for recent critical trends. As he writes at one point: \"opera challenges us by means of its brash impurity, its loose ends and excess of meaning, its superfluity of narrative secrets.\" Verdi's works, many of which underwent drastic revisions over the years and which sometimes bore marks of an unusual collaboration between composer and librettist, illustrate in particular why it can sometimes be misleading to assign fixed meanings to an opera. Parker instead explores works likeRigoletto, Il trovatore, La forza del destino, andFalstafffrom a variety of angles, and addresses such contentious topics as the composer's involvement with Italian politics, the possibilities of an \"authentic\" staging of his work, and the advantages and pitfalls of analyzing his operas according to terms that his contemporaries might have understood. Parker takes into account many of the interdisciplinary influences currently engaging musicologists, in particular narrative and feminist theory. But he also demonstrates that close attention to the documentary evidence--especially that offered by autograph scores--can stimulate equal interpretive activity. This book serves as a model of research and critical thinking about opera, while nevertheless retaining a deep respect for opera's continuing power to touch generations of listeners.

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.

Among Mr. Kerman's most important books was \"Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology\" (1985), in which he wrote: \"Critical thought in music lags conceptually far behind that in the other arts. In fact nearly all musical thinkers travel at a respectful distance behind the latest chariots (or bandwagons) of intellectual life in general.\" Nonetheless, he concluded, \"I end this book with hopes for motion.\" Mr. Kerman expressed his often contentious opinions vividly. He described Puccini's \"Tosca\" as \"a shabby little shocker.\" Writing about Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1997, he wrote, \"Now nearly 100 years old, Rach 3's life expectancy goes up every year, and given the wonders of bioscience, the piece is likely to end up in some dismaying retirement community of the 22nd century, toothless, creaky, scarcely ecstatic, but still ready to play and above all garrulous.\" In writing about opera he sometimes made predictions that were not borne out -- that Puccini's \"Turandot\" and Strauss's \"Salome\" would disappear from the repertory, for example. He described the conclusion of \"Salome\" as \"masterly\" in musical technique but, \"in sentiment, the most banal sound in the whole opera.\"

[Joseph Kerman] was a pianist, accompanist, music arranger and a prolific writer and music reviewer, as well as \"an award-winning scholar of Western music who often stressed the role of art as a form of communication,\" UC Berkeley noted in announcing his passing. Organizers say the forum \"will focus on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that are beneficial to the local and surrounding communities. Articles of the declaration include repatriation of tribal ancestral remains and the protection of and free access to sacred sites in the Bay Area.\" This year's edition of the popular tour focuses on Maybeck's Rose Walk and \"will feature an eclectic mix of artistic and charming houses designed by Berkeley's most notable architects, including Bernard Maybeck; John Galen Howard; Julia Morgan; Ernest Coxhead; Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr.; Sidney, Noble and Archie Newsom; and William I. Garren,\" among others, as well as hidden gardens along the way.

Who \"speaks\" to us inThe Sorcerer's Apprentice,in Wagner's operas, in a Mahler symphony? In asking this question, Carolyn Abbate opens nineteenth-century operas and instrumental works to new interpretations as she explores the voices projected by music. The nineteenth-century metaphor of music that \"sings\" is thus reanimated in a new context, and Abbate proposes interpretive strategies that \"de-center\" music criticism, that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, and that celebrate musical gestures often marginalized by conventional music analysis.

[...]nearly all musical thinkers travel at a respectful distance behind the latest chariots (or bandwagons) of intellectual life in general.\"