Why Classical Music Still Matters (Simpson Book in the Humanities) [Hardcover]

Lawrence Kramer (Author)

Book Description

Series: Simpson Book in the Humanities | Publication Date: May 2, 2007

"What can be done about the state of classical music?" Lawrence Kramer asks in this elegant, sharply observed, and beautifully written extended essay. Classical music, whose demise has been predicted for at least a decade, has always had its staunch advocates, but in today's media-saturated world there are real concerns about its viability. Why Classical Music Still Matters takes a forthright approach by engaging both skeptics and music lovers alike.
In seven highly original chapters, Why Classical Music Still Matters affirms the value of classical music--defined as a body of nontheatrical music produced since the eighteenth century with the single aim of being listened to--by revealing what its values are: the specific beliefs, attitudes, and meanings that the music has supported in the past and which, Kramer believes, it can support in the future.
Why Classical Music Still Matters also clears the air of old prejudices. Unlike other apologists, whose defense of the music often depends on arguments about the corrupting influence of popular culture, Kramer admits that classical music needs a broader, more up-to-date rationale. He succeeds in engaging the reader by putting into words music's complex relationship with individual human drives and larger social needs. In prose that is fresh, stimulating, and conversational, he explores the nature of subjectivity, the conquest of time and mortality, the harmonization of humanity and technology, the cultivation of attention, and the liberation of human energy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Classical music isn't necessarily that bad off, Kramer admits; there's still a diverse range of concert performances, and many listeners are choosing to download works from the Internet. But "something still feels wrong," something he identifies as the loss of the genre's crucial role in our cultural lives. The reasons Kramer, a music and literature professor at Fordham University, offers for why one ought to appreciate classical music fall back on the usual high-culture arguments that it "asks its listeners to imagine a work with more fullness and complexity than most other music does," converting emotions into tangible sound yet somehow not reducing them to abstraction. The problem with writing about classical music, of course, is that no matter how passionately you describe a Brahms quintet, it's not the same as hearing an actual performance. At times, Kramer's enthusiasm becomes overwrought, as when he rhapsodizes about the piano's harp and hammers uniting to create an instrument of " magic and engineering." He's more convincing when he describes the effect a young busker's Bach sonata has on the crowds at a New York subway platform. Such moments of direct observation are sprinkled throughout the erudite text—if only they appeared more consistently. (May)
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Review

"[Kramer] . . . provides readers with the essential vocabulary to understand, actively engage with, and give meaning and value to classical music." -- Library Journal

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520250826
• ISBN-13: 978-0520250826
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #381,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why musical meaning still intrigues us, June 27, 2009

By 

Roochak - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Classical Music Still Matters (Paperback)

Sure, we enjoy listening to classical music, but why should the music really matter to us? Lawrence Kramer has set himself quite a challenge trying to answer that question, and understanding his argument in this brief but difficult book is no less of a challenge for the reader.

The latter is partly a function of Kramer's prose-poetic style: you're invited to negotiate 226 pages of such passages as "Regardless of the specific analogies involved, thinking about the performer or performance in the sense of creative reproduction and worldly activity takes us into the wider field of human performances, both symbolic and material, and therefore into the realms of action, desire, social condition, and the vitality of experience." Philosophical arguments about aesthetic value are notoriously difficult to follow in any event; it comes with the territory.

While Kramer has only good things to say about jazz and pop music, he locates a reflexive, ambivalent individualism -- the product of Enlightenment values and a fundamental condition of modernity -- in "classical" music, here identified with European art music from Bach to Ligeti. If the burden of creativity in jazz and pop lies almost entirely within the power of the performer (or arranger), the classical score is a symbol, a notional concept of music; the actual music is created by the subjective listener, in close collaboration with the composer and the performer(s). Far from being "timeless", classical music is provisional; it exists only in the hearing of the listening subject, and so the music has different meanings in different contexts, from the concert hall to the movie soundtrack.

Kramer's summary chapters on musical value bookend the essay, whose individual chapters focus on melody, which enacts a journey through experience; on score and performance, or the musical expression of emotions that we can't, or won't, put into words (Kramer's examples drawn from Hollywood movies are persuasive here); on art songs of loss and defiance, and the life-affirming process of finding meaning in them; on the paradox of classical piano music, which centers on a machine designed for players to embody mind and spirit, both their own and the composer's; and finally, a chapter on how art music creates a sense of cultural memory, a critical and reflexive sense that transcends mere nostalgia.

This is by no means an easy book to read, but I finished it with a richer sense of what this music has to offer to the engaged listener: the stimulation of a wider imaginative freedom, with which to better grasp the relation of [musical] work to world. And if classical music still matters, that's not too much to ask of it.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why Classical Music Still Matters, December 25, 2009

By 

Alemarh_León "AMH" (Leon, Guanajuato, MX) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Why Classical Music Still Matters (Paperback)

The book is very well written. The topics are very well developed. The reader will find very entertaining, especially those who want the basics of classical music. I had a problem with the book I received, it had a defect: 11 were blank sheets. Reported this to Amazon and they sent me another book at no cost.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointment, January 25, 2010

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SFT (Dalton MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Classical Music Still Matters (Paperback)

I was recently astounded to hear that some malls have been piping in classical music to keep kids from congregating; it seems most modern kids literally "can't stand" classical music. I picked up this little book to see if it might quickly give shape to the reasons I have for my long love affair with classical music. Alas, if I were looking for philosophy and aesthetics, I would have given it a very careful read; but my interest here was not academic, and I wanted a quck answer, which I did not easily find. Well, maybe I did receive my quick answer, in a backhand sort of way. Classical music takes mental effort, concentration, and emotional availablility. I brought none of these qualities to the book as I do bring them to my classical listening.