Writing through Music
Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics
Jann Pasler
Reviews and Awards
"The astonishingly wide-ranging and trenchant essays in Jann Pasler's Writing Through Music are united by their passionate engagement in the history, theory, and criticism of Modernist and Postmodernist musics. Pasler's stated aim-"to flesh out the contingencies and rich complexity of the particular moments in which music was conceived, created, performed, and heard," is admirably realized in this collection. Throughout, Pasler displays a dazzling command of scholarship and archival research, and she has assembled a wealth of materials that support her arguments. Reading Writing Through Music is an exhilarating experience."-- Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
"Writing Through Music takes us into the deeper meanings of the world currents that flow in the vast non linear context of music. Pasler knows the music and she also knows that music involves much more than the sounds performers play. Music resounds as a profound force in global culture. She fearlessly investigates and finds the roots of major relationships through her scholarship and passion. I recognize my own living through music reflected in her enlightening article on composers. The writing also flows beautifully in each essay. The intelligence of Pasler's essays is the basis for a new musicology."-- Pauline Oliveros, Composer
"Pasler helps us to see how 'doing things with music' (including writing about music) is social action, writ large....What makes Jann Pasler's work so special is that it combines finely grained historically located research with theoretical power and an anthropological focus - nothing is, in principle, peripheral to socio-musical study since everything is in principle, inter-related music and writing about music is a critical tool and one that activates and develops 'multiple layers of awareness'. In concentrating on the 'dialectical' relationship between music and extra-musical phenomena, Pasler illuminates music's importance in the world."-- Tia DeNora, Professor of Sociology of Music and Director of Research, Sociology/Philosophy, University of Exeter
"Jann Pasler's Writing Through Music represents humanistic scholarship at its very best - an account of why music matters not only to musicians but to all of us, a powerful explanation of why her identifications as a woman and as a postmodernist should inflect her work."--Susan McClary, Professor of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles
"Evocative and entertaining." --Music & Letters