Description
One of the best-known prose stylists in contemporary musicology, Susan McClary brings together a fascinating set of essays in Making Sense of Music that focus on temporality and the body as ways of understanding music. Prefaced by a Foreword from celebrated theatre director Peter Sellars, the chapters engage variously with ribald songs of the Renaissance, the performance of Bach fugues, time-bending in seventeenth-century keyboard works, Grieg's Norwegian swerve, Florence Price's reclaiming of the spiritual, erotic scenarios in Mahler, representations of motherhood in Kaija Saariaho's operas, and queer elements in classical and popular repertories. McClary grounds her readings within the specifics of historical time and place, even as she shows how the music itself relies on gesture and the body. In sum, this book demonstrates in case studies taken from a wide variety of practices how music draws upon and shapes human subjective experience.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Peter SellarsFundamentals: An IntroductionI. Why I Do What I Do1. A Life in Musicology: Stradella and Me2. In Praise of Contingency: The Powers and Limits of Theory3. Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music4. Writing about Music - and the Music of Writing5. The Bodies of Angels6. The Lure of the Sublime: Revisiting Postwar Modernism7. Playing the Identity Card: Of Grieg, Indians, and Women8. The Object/The Objective of Analysis: The Case of Florence PriceII. Messing With Early Music9. Unwashed Masses: Music for the Morning After10. Tumescence and Detumescence in a Monteverdi Madrigal11. Doing the Time Warp in Seventeenth-Century Music12. In the Realm of All the Senses: Analyzing the Music of Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre13. Salome in the Court of Queen Christina14. Adorno Plays the WTCIII. Sex and Gender, Redux15. The Classical Closet16. Soprano Masculinities17. Sister Campers18. Kaija Saariaho, Mater19. Mahler Making Love: Mengelberg's AdagiettoIndex
