Sound Judgment

The essays in Sound Judgment span the full career of Richard Leppert, from his earliest to work that appears here for the first time, on subjects drawn from early modernity to the present concerning music both popular and classical, European and North American. Noted for his path-breaking interdisciplinary scholarship on music and visual culture, the collection includes key essays on music's visualization in art practices in virtually all visual media, including film. The fourteen essays comprising this volume demonstrate Leppert's many contributions to critical musicology, particularly in the areas of aesthetics as well as social and intellectual history, all of it grounded in a heterodox body of critical and cultural theory, with the work of Theodor W. Adorno particularly noteworthy. The collection is preceded by an introduction in which Leppert traces his intellectual development, defined in large part by the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s and their aftermath both in the academy and in society at large.

Richard Leppert is Regents Professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. His research addresses the relations of music, imagery and associated practices to social and cultural formation, principally revolving around issues of gender, class and race in Europe and America from early modernity to the present.

Contents: Introduction. Part I Aurality: On reading Adorno hearing Schubert; Opera, aesthetic violence, and the imposition of modernity: Fitzcarraldo; 'Everybody's lonesome for somebody': age, the body, and experience in the music of Hank Williams (co-authored with George Lipsitz); Gender sonics: the voice of Patsy Cline. Part II Visuality: The prodigal son: Teniers and Ghezzi; Concert in a House: musical iconography and musical thought; Imagery, musical confrontation and cultural difference in early 18th-century London; Male agony: awakening conscience; The musician of the imagination. Part III Practice: Music teachers of upper-class amateur musicians in 18th-century England; Music and the body: dance, power, submission. Part IV Utopia: Nature and exile: Adorno, Mahler and the appropriation of kitsch; Four hands, once again [by Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Jonathan Wipplinger]; Four hands, three hearts: a commentary: Music 'pushed to the edge of existence' (Adorno, listening, and the question of hope); Index.