Writing through Music

Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics

Jann Pasler

A groundbreaking collection that challenges assumptions about important cultural issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music
Draws together a variety of fields, bridging multiple disciplines
Includes both new essays and material previously published in difficult-to-find journals, volumes, and festschriften, many available only in French

Writing through Music

Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics

Jann Pasler

Description

Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations.

The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural and philosophical issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holmès, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the complex cultural and political networks in which music participates. This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage with music in fresh and exciting ways.

In these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive as a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into how we negotiate the world. Jann Pasler's Writing through Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical lens to focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social issues of our time.

Writing through Music

Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics

Jann Pasler

List of Illustrations
List of Musical Examples
Foreward by George Lewis
Introduction
I. Time, Narrative, and Memory
1. Narrative and Narrativity in Music
2. Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory
3. Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents
II. Self-Fashioning
4. Deconstructing d'Indy, or the Problem of a Composer's Reputation
5. New Music as Confrontation: the Musical Sources of Cocteau's Identity
6. Inventing a tradition: John Cage's Composition in Retrospect
III. Identity and Nation
7. Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera
8. The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès
9. Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the Yellow Peril
IV. Patrons and Patronage
10. Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation
11. The Political Economy of Composition in the American University, 1965-1985
V. The Everyday Life of the Past
12. Concert Programs and their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology
13. Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the "Popular" in late-nineteenth-century French Music

Writing through Music

Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics

Jann Pasler

Author Information

Jann Pasler, music scholar, documentary filmmaker, and pianist, is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where she founded the graduate program Critical Studies and Experimental Practices (CSEP). She has published widely on French and American contemporary music, modernism and postmodernism, cultural life in France and the French colonies. Recent books: Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France and, as editor/author, Saint-Saëns and his World. She is currently completing Music, Race, and Colonialism in the French Empire, 1860s--1950s as well as a book, in French, on music ethnography from Indochina to Central Africa.

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