During the last few decades, most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and "Blue Suede Shoes" are equally valuable as cultural texts. In Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson challenges these assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The author maintains that music is more than just "a matter of taste": while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background noise, other music claims to function as art. This book considers the value of classical music in...
During the last few decades, most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beetho...
This book considers the idea of nature in the music of Anton Webern. It stands out from other studies because it explores the wider social and cultural dimensions of the music, as opposed to an often narrow, technical analysis. In doing so it offers an important case study for the way in which social ideas can be discussed in relation to apparently "abstract" modern music. Moreover, it does so in relation to musical details, not simply on the level of biography or cultural history.
This book considers the idea of nature in the music of Anton Webern. It stands out from other studies because it explores the wider social and cultura...
This book considers the idea of nature in the music of Anton Webern. It stands out from other studies because it explores the wider social and cultural dimensions of the music, as opposed to an often narrow, technical analysis. In doing so it offers an important case study for the way in which social ideas can be discussed in relation to apparently "abstract" modern music. Moreover, it does so in relation to musical details, not simply on the level of biography or cultural history.
This book considers the idea of nature in the music of Anton Webern. It stands out from other studies because it explores the wider social and cultura...
Passionate and intense in one moment, ironic or brash in the next, Mahler's music speaks with a diversity of voices that often undermine its own ideals of unity, narrative struggle and transcendent affirmation. The composer plays constantly with musical genres and styles, moving between them without warning in a way that often bewildered his contemporaries. Ranging freely across Mahler's symphonies and songs in a thoughtful and thorough study of his musical speech, Julian Johnson considers how this body of music foregrounds the idea of artifice, construction and musical convention while at...
Passionate and intense in one moment, ironic or brash in the next, Mahler's music speaks with a diversity of voices that often undermine its own ideal...
Praised in The Economist as "heartfelt and finely reasoned...wise, perceptive and inspiring," Who Needs Classical Music? offers a fresh and balanced defense of the value of classical music in contemporary culture. Challenging the many cultural critics who contend that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and "Blue Suede Shoes" are equally valuable, Julian Johnson counters that music is more than just "a matter of taste." Music can provide entertainment or simply serve as background noise. Classical music, he suggests, is...
Praised in The Economist as "heartfelt and finely reasoned...wise, perceptive and inspiring," Who Needs Classical Music? offers a fr...
What does music have to say about modernity? How can this apparently unworldly art tell us anything about modern life? In Out of Time, author Julian Johnson begins from the idea that it can, arguing that music renders an account of modernity from the inside, a history not of events but of sensibility, an archaeology of experience. If music is better understood from this broad perspective, our idea of modernity itself is also enriched by the specific insights of music. The result is a rehearing of modernity and a rethinking of music - an account that challenges ideas of linear...
What does music have to say about modernity? How can this apparently unworldly art tell us anything about modern life? In Out of Time, au...
