Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject

"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.
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~Notes

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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.

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~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