This selection of sixteen of Nicholas Cook's essays covers the period from 1987 to 2004 and brings out the development of the author's ideas over these years. In particular the two keywords of the title -Meaning and Performance- represent critical directions that expand to the point that, by the end of the book, they become coextensive: music is seen as social action and meaning as created by that action. Within this overall direction, a wide variety of topics is explored, ranging from Beethoven to Schenker, from Chinese qin music to jazz and rock, from perceptual psychology to sketch studies...

The essays in Sound Judgment span the full career of Richard Leppert, from his earliest to work that appears here for the first time, on subjects drawn from early modernity to the present concerning music both popular and classical, European and North American. Noted for his path-breaking interdisciplinary scholarship on music and visual culture, the collection includes key essays on music's visualization in art practices in virtually all visual media, including film. The fourteen essays comprising this volume demonstrate Leppert's many contributions to critical musicology, particularly in...