This provocative volume of essays is now available in paperback. The contributors to this volume - musicologists, sociologists, cultural theorists - all challenge the view that music occupies an autonomous aesthetic sphere. Recently, socially and politically grounded enterprises such as feminism, semiotics and deconstruction have effected a major transformation in the ways in which the arts and humanities are studied, leading in turn to a systematic investigation of the implicit assumptions underlying the critical methods of the last two hundred years. Influenced by these approaches, the writers here question a prevailing ideology that insists there is a division between music and society and examine the ways in which the two do in fact interact and mediate one another within and across socio-cultural boundaries.
List of illustrations; Introduction; Acknowledgments; Foreword: the ideology of autonomous art Janet Wolff; 1. The blasphemy of talking politics Bach Year Susan McClary; 2. Music, domestic life and cultural chauvinism: images of British subjects at home in India Richard Leppert; 3. On grounding Chopin Rose Rosengard Subotnik; 4. Towards an aesthetic of popular music Simon Frith; 5. Music and male hegemony John Shepherd; 6. The sound of music in the era of its electronic reproducibility John Mowitt; Index.
