Writing Through Music

"Drawing on a passion for music and a diverse interdisciplinary toolbox, Jann Pasler invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the forces that affect our sonic encounters. In a collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral, and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste. Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to important public debates about who we can be as individuals, communities, and nations." "The author's approaches to musical biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about important cultural issues including national identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the economics of power, and the relationship between classical and popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holmes, Jean Cocteau, and John Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in the early twentieth century in ways that resonate with experiences today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs narrative." "In these essays, music - whether beautiful or cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible - comes alive as a bearer of ideas and that offers insights into how we negotiate the world."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Philosophy. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.