Lawrence Kramer

Список книг автора Lawrence Kramer



    The Thought of Music

    Lawrence Kramer

    What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? <I>The Thought of Music</I> grapples directly with these fundamental questions&mdash;questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. In this third volume in a trilogy on musical understanding that includes <I>Interpreting Music</I> and <I>Expression and Truth</I>, Lawrence Kramer seeks answers in both thought <I>about</I> music and thought <I>in</I> music&mdash;thinking in tones. He skillfully assesses musical scholarship in the aftermath of critical musicology and musical hermeneutics and in view of more recent concerns with embodiment, affect, and performance. This authoritative and timely work challenges the prevailing conceptions of every topic it addresses: language, context, and culture; pleasure and performance; and, through music, the foundations of understanding in the humanities.<BR /><BR />The publisher gratefully acknowledges the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

    Expression and Truth

    Lawrence Kramer

    Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. <i>Expression and Truth</i> rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world.<br /><br />"Recent years have seen the return of the claim that music’s power resides in its ineffability. In <i>Expression and Truth</i>, Lawrence Kramer presents his most elaborate response to this claim. Drawing on philosophers such as Wittgenstein and on close analyses of nineteenth-century compositions, Kramer demonstrates how music operates as a medium for articulating cultural meanings and that music matters too profoundly to be cordoned off from the kinds of critical readings typically brought to the other arts. A tour-de-force by one of musicology’s most influential thinkers."—Susan McClary, <i>Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music</i>.

    Interpreting Music

    Lawrence Kramer

    Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—"interpreting music" in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning—even the very concept of music—while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation in general. The book illustrates the many dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music by working through music to wider philosophical and cultural questions.

    Musical Meaning

    Lawrence Kramer