Bøker av Susan McClary

In this boldly innovative book, renowned musicologist Susan McClary presents an illuminating cultural interpretation of the Italian madrigal, one of the most influential repertories of the Renaissance. A genre that sought to produce simulations in sound of complex interiorities, the madrigal introduced into music a vast range of new signifying practices: musical representations of emotions, desire, gender stereotypes, reason, madness, tensions between mind and body, and much more. In doing so, it not only greatly expanded the expressive agendas of European music but also recorded certain assumptions of the time concerning selfhood, making it an invaluable resource for understanding the history of Western subjectivity. Modal Subjectivities covers the span of the sixteenth-century polyphonic madrigal, from its early manifestations in Philippe Verdelot's settings of Machiavelli in the 1520s through the tortured chromatic experiments of Carlo Gesualdo. Although McClary takes the lyrics into account in shaping her readings, she focuses particularly on the details of the music itself-the principal site of the genre's self-fashionings. In order to work effectively with musical meanings in this pretonal repertory, she also develops an analytical method that allows her to unravel the sophisticated allegorical structures characteristic of the madrigal. This pathbreaking book demonstrates how we might glean insights into a culture on the basis of its nonverbal artistic enterprises.

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states-desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians-whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice-were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of various cultural forms - notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance - to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s.

Divided into four parts: Interpretation and Polemics, Gender and Sexuality, Popular Music, and Early Music. Each of the essays treats music as cultural text and has an interdisciplinary appeal. This title is intended for those interested in the life and times of a renegade musicologist.

Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, this book offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues. It tackles big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.

When it was originally published in 1991, Feminine Endings was immediately controversial for its unprecedented intermingling of cultural criticism and musical studies, an approach that came to be called "the New Musicology." Through case studies of works ranging from the canonical -- operas by Monteverdi and Bizet -- to the contemporary -- the performance art of Diamanda Galas and popular songs by Madonna -- Susan McClary focuses on the ways music produces images of gender, desire, pleasure, and the body, and explores the gender-based metaphors that circulate in discourse about music. The now classic work features a new introduction that discusses the critical reception it received and the debates it has inspired.