Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Paperback)

by Joseph Kerman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Nothing less than a Who's Who of musicology, and a What's What of theory, analysis, and musical philosophy.
--Erich Leinsdorf (New York Times Book Review )

A masterly exposition of what Kennan views as the pivotal intellectual issues surrounding postwar musical studies--an exposition that even his critics would readily concede him to be uniquely qualified to undertake. Musicians of all sorts ought to view this as a challenge...to give music the balanced critical attention it deserves.
--Robert Winter (New York Review of Books )

A gracefully polemical survey of "modern ideas and ideologies of music," in the course of which the author touches upon many aspects of music and musical life in the 20th century...Important and consistently stimulating.
--David Hamilton (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

A timely proposal, and one well worth investigating for anyone who is interested in music as a discipline...It represents a useful, and indeed unique, attempt to map out in English the issues of our day.
--Christopher Wintle (Times Literary Supplement )

Product Description

Contemplating Music is a book for all serious music lovers. Here is the first full-scale of ideas and ideologies in music over the past forty years; a period during which virtually every aspect of music was transformed.

With this book, Joesph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music--with which musicology is tradtionally equated--but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.

Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music towarda critical orientation, As examples, he presents a fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950's and Beethoven studies in the 1960's. He sketched the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Miltion Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster's songs into the cannons of "black" music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Comtemplating Music is fulled with wisdom and trenchant commmentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 15, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674166787
• ISBN-13: 978-0674166783
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #570,401 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)