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

by L Kramer (Author)
2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 251 pages
  • Publisher: University of California Press (1 May 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0520250826
  • ISBN-13: 978-0520250826
  • Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 13.7 x 2.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 528,667 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

'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.

About the Author

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University and editor of 19th-Century Music. His many books include Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (2004), Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (1995), After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (1997), and Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (2002), all from the University of California Press.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Why musical meaning still intrigues us, 28 Jun 2009
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.
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1 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Hard work, 19 Jan 2008
By Mr. M. Burgess - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This is not an easy or enjoyable read. It's very academic and is unlikely to appeal to anyone who doesn't enjoy a somewhat high-flown, pretentious style of writing.
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