From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the Public Sphere

Chanan, Michael

ISBN 10: 1859847064 / ISBN 13: 9781859847060

Published by Verso, 1999

Very good condition. Minor dust jacket shelf wear. Clean and tight. No writing or marking. Seller Inventory # 4871

Synopsis:

In this book, a continuation of Michael Chanan’s investigation of the relation between music and society, the author examines the composer in the light of Jurgen Habermas’s study of the public sphere. Taking his cue from the German philosopher’s remarks about the bourgeois concert audience, the emergence of criticism and the development of autonomous music, Chanan examines the fate of the composer through successive incarnations, from Handel, Bach and Mozart in the eighteenth century by way of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler and Debussy in the nineteenth, to Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Gershwin, Weill, Ellington, Cage and Boulez in the twentieth.

Drawing upon recent work in feminist and gay musicology, the book ranges over themes such as subjectivity and identity in Schubert and Chopin, the ascendancy of the Romantic personality, the lure of the exotic in Milhaud’s work, and the political economy of music.

A detailed history of the idea of the composer as a public figure, Chanan’s book charts both the dramatic change in the listening audience and, simultaneously, the composer’s progressive marginalization from the centre of musical life.

“It is undoubtedly true, as the music critic Hans Keller used to observe, that more people nowadays hear a single broadcast of a new work by an avant-garde composer than would have heard all Beethoven’s symphonies in his own lifetime. But the effects are not only quantitative; they also include radical alterations in the relationship between the audience and the object of aesthetic consumption, which seriously affect the situation of the composer, whose audience may now be wider and larger, but also becomes ever more fragmented and anonymous.”

About the Author: Michael Chanan is a filmmaker, writer and teacher. He has written books on various aspects of film and music, including Repeated Takes, The Dream that Kicks and The Cuban Image.

Bibliographic Details

Title: From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the ...
Publisher: Verso
Publication Date: 1999
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good