In a highly influential essay, Rose Rosengard Subotnik critiques "structural listening" as an attempt to situate musical meaning solely within the unfolding of the musical structure itself. The authors of this volume, prominent young music historians and theorists writing on repertories ranging from Beethoven to MTV, take up Subotnik's challenge in what is likely to be one of musical scholarship's intellectual touchstones for many years to come. Original, innovative, and sophisticated, their essays explore not only the implications of the "structural listening" model but also the alternative...

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The early seventeenth century, when the first operas were written and technical advances with far-reaching consequencessuch as tonal musicbegan to develop, is also notable for another shift: the displacement of aristocratic music-makers by a new professional class of performers. In this book, Andrew Dell Antonio looks at a related phenomenon: the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing. Drawing from contemporaneous discourses and other commentaries on music, the visual arts, and Church doctrine, Dell Antonio links the new ideas about...