The edge of meaning

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Jann Pasler

"Drawing on a passion for music and a diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In a 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 approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural 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 twentieth century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative." "In these essays, music - whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible - comes alive as a bearer of ideas and that offers insights into how we negotiate the world."--Jacket.

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Theodor W. Adorno

"Quasi una Fantasia contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music and to the monographs on Berg, Mahler and Wagner. But in the range of its themes and references (from Mozart to Boulez, the minuet to the jitterbug) and in the clarity of its arguments, Quasi una Fantasia stands alone among Adorno's writings on music."--BOOK JACKET. "At the book's core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno's 'dialectical portrait' of Stravinsky, in which he both reconsiders and refines the damning indictment he gave in Philosophy of Modern Music.^ In 'Vers une musique informelle', an enormously influential essay, he plots a course for a music of the future 'which could take up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom'. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, such as Bizet's Carmen and Weber's Der Freischutz, along with an entertainingly caustic 'Natural History of the Theatre' which explores the rituals and hierarchies of the auditorium, from upper circle to foyer."--BOOK JACKET. "'The positive element of kitsch', Adorno remarks, 'lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.' Musical kitsch is the target of several of the shorter pieces: on Gounod's Ave Maria or Tchaikovsky's 'clumsy naivety'; on the 'Penny Serenade' or the transformation of Mozart into chocolate-box rococo.^ Yet even while Adorno demolishes 'commodity music' he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these writings. For Adorno, music and philosophy were inextricably linked: Quasi una Fantasia will enlarge our understanding of both."--BOOK JACKET.

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John McKinnell

"Close examination of the significant theme of other-worldly encounters in Norse myth and legend, including giantesses, monsters and the dead"--Provided by publisher

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Jonathan Boulter

Written in a clear, accessible language, this guide challenges and encourages students to grapple with the difficult ideas and questions posed by Beckett's texts.