Overview
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes.While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond.The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.
Full Product Details
Author: Kate Guthrie (Senior Lecturer in Music, Senior Lecturer in Music, University of Bristol) ,
Christopher Chowrimootoo (Associate Professor of Musicology and Liberal Studies, Associate Professor of Musicology and Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 17.30cm
, Height: 4.60cm
, Length: 23.60cm
Weight: 1.225kg
ISBN: 9780197523933
ISBN 10: 0197523935
Pages: 632
Publication Date: 07 February 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
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Author Information
Kate Guthrie is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. She is author of The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain, which received the North American British Music Studies Association's Diana McVeagh Prize. She has published numerous articles, including her award-winning pieces in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Music and Letters. Before joining Bristol, she undertook her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southampton and her AHRC-funded doctoral research at King's College London. She is on the board of Twentieth-Century Music. Christopher Chowrimootoo is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Middlebrow Modernism: Britten's Operas and the Great Divide and co-editor of ""Musicology and the Middlebrow,"" a colloquy published in Journal of the American Musicological Society. He has published in such leading journals as Twentieth-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, and Cambridge Opera Journal, and has won prizes from the Royal Musical Association and the Kurt Weill Foundation.
