Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture: An Introduction to Music Criticism

Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture: An Introduction to Music Criticism offers a clear, hands-on guide for emerging music critics that brings together aesthetics, critical theory, and practical music criticism in an accessible format. Over the course of the book, readers develop a vocabulary and framework for criticizing music of all kinds and for various media while learning how to connect music to its cultural, social, and political contexts.

Excerpts from primary sources throughout provide a wide range of writing examples, while Chapters address the distinct challenges of describing and interpreting music for various media and in diverse formats. Along the way, the book explores questions at the core of music and its criticism, such as what constitutes a musical work and what makes a piece of music “authentic”; it also introduces critical lenses, including feminist and queer criticism, postcolonialism and critical race theory, as well as the analysis of music in consumer culture. Addressing both classical and popular music criticism, Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture is a comprehensive and lively textbook that enables students to uncover, articulate, and analyze what makes music compelling and meaningful.

Katherine Walker is Associate Professor of Music at Hobart & William Smith Colleges.