Overview

One of the best-known prose stylists in contemporary musicology, Susan McClary brings together a fascinating set of essays in Making Sense of Music that focus on temporality and the body as ways of understanding music. Prefaced by a Foreword from celebrated theatre director Peter Sellars, the chapters engage variously with ribald songs of the Renaissance, the performance of Bach fugues, time-bending in seventeenth-century keyboard works, Grieg's Norwegian swerve, Florence Price's reclaiming of the spiritual, erotic scenarios in Mahler, representations of motherhood in Kaija Saariaho's operas, and queer elements in classical and popular repertories. McClary grounds her readings within the specifics of historical time and place, even as she shows how the music itself relies on gesture and the body. In sum, this book demonstrates in case studies taken from a wide variety of practices how music draws upon and shapes human subjective experience.

Full Product Details

Author:   Susan McClary (Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.503kg
ISBN:  

9780197779767

ISBN 10:   019777976
Pages:   344
Publication Date:   24 July 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Foreword by Peter Sellars Fundamentals: An Introduction I. Why I Do What I Do 1. A Life in Musicology: Stradella and Me 2. In Praise of Contingency: The Powers and Limits of Theory 3. Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music 4. Writing about Music - and the Music of Writing 5. The Bodies of Angels 6. The Lure of the Sublime: Revisiting Postwar Modernism 7. Playing the Identity Card: Of Grieg, Indians, and Women 8. The Object/The Objective of Analysis: The Case of Florence Price II. Messing With Early Music 9. Unwashed Masses: Music for the Morning After 10. Tumescence and Detumescence in a Monteverdi Madrigal 11. Doing the Time Warp in Seventeenth-Century Music 12. In the Realm of All the Senses: Analyzing the Music of Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre 13. Salome in the Court of Queen Christina 14. Adorno Plays the WTC III. Sex and Gender, Redux 15. The Classical Closet 16. Soprano Masculinities 17. Sister Campers 18. Kaija Saariaho, Mater 19. Mahler Making Love: Mengelberg's Adagietto Index

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Author Information

Susan McClary (Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) specializes in the cultural criticism of music. Her books include Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality; Georges Bizet: Carmen; Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form; Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal; Reading Music; Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music; Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture; The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music. She previously taught at University of Minnesota, McGill, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. McClary received a MacArthur Foundation ""Genius"" Fellowship in 1995, and her work has been translated into at least twenty languages.

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