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Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject
Published by: Indiana University Press
200 Pages, 27 music exx.
- eBook
- 9780253017222
- Published: July 2015
$9.99
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Departing from the traditional German school of music theorists, Michael Klein injects a unique French critical theory perspective into the framework of music and meaning. Using primarily Lacanian notions of the symptom, that unnamable jouissance located in the unconscious, and the registers of subjectivity (the Imaginary, the Symbolic Order, and the Real), Klein explores how we understand music as both an artistic form created by "the subject" and an artistic expression of a culture that imposes its history on this modern subject. By creatively navigating from critical theory to music, film, fiction, and back to music, Klein distills the kinds of meaning that we have been missing when we perform, listen to, think about, and write about music without the insights of Lacan and others into formulations of modern subjectivity.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Music and the Symptom
2. The Acoustic Mirror as Formative of Auditory Pleasure and Fantasy: Chopin's Berceuse, Brahms's Romanze, and Saariaho's "Parfum de l'instant"
3. Debussy and the Three Machines of the Proustian Narrative
4. Chopin Dreams: the Mazurka in C# Minor as Sinthome
Intermezzo: On Agency
5. Postmodern Quotation, the Signifying Chain, and the Erasure of History
6. Lutosławski, Molar and Molecular
Works Cited
Index
Michael Klein is Professor of Music Studies at Temple University. He is author of Intertextuality in Western Art Music (IUP, 2004) and editor (with Nicholas Reyland), of Music and Narrative since 1900 (IUP, 2012).
"As a work of music theory, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject represents a unique aesthetic, semiotic, and hermeneutic approach more commonly found in musicology. It takes advantage of every opportunity to challenge music theory's comfortable obsession with closed systems of analysis. . . . Klein is clearly one of today's leading scholars of musical narrative and subjectivity.
~Notes
"
"
It is a consequence of the richness of Michael Klein's Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject that we are able to trope endlessly upon it, to spin out our own arabesques of musical thought. If the contexts that I have presented above help in any way to ensure that this precious book will be widely read and integrated into one's work as a researcher, teacher, and musician, then they will have served their purpose.
" ~Music Theory Spectrum
"Klein (Temple Univ.) uses the theoretical frameworks of recent French critical theory, notably the thought of Jacques Lacan, to build a bridge between poststructural criticism and music. . . Highly recommended."
~Choice
"In this scintillating, endlessly thought-provoking book, Michael Klein amplifies musical understanding in fundamental ways—nothing less. He shows, beyond question or cavil, how advanced thinking about subjectivity and language can fold into the interpretation of music, and more, how such thinking resonates with the experience of music. His primary resources are Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, whose musical pertinence he establishes decisively in a series of readings in which philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, movies, and music—among other things—continually comment on each other. The results are fresh, unexpected, and revealing. And there is nothing the least bit arcane about any of this. This book is wholly down to earth, inimitably so. No matter how challenging the ideas—and they should be challenging—they never lose touch with nor fail to illuminate the ways in which we and music together struggle to ground the sense of being an actual person in an actual world."
~Lawrence Kramer, author of Interpreting Music and Why Classical Music Still Matters
"This volume offers a remarkably perceptive, virtuosic reading of the current culture of Western art music in the light of the psychological and critical work of Lacan and other contemporary theorists. Michael Klein is at the top of the field in the degree to which he has absorbed and internalized all this work, so that he can move effortlessly from Theory to music, to novels, to psychology, back to music, to movies, and on and on, all the while writing with a unique voice and a flair for the pithy turn of phrase, that keeps us engaged and hungry for more, all the way to the end."
~Patrick McCreless, Yale University