Musicological Identities

No music scholar has made as profound an impact on contemporary thought as Susan McClary, a central figure in what has been termed the 'new musicology'. In this volume seventeen distinguished scholars pay tribute to her work, with essays addressing three approaches to music that have characterized her own writings: reassessing music's role in identity formation, particularly regarding gender, sexuality, and race; exploring music's capacity to define and regulate perceptions and experiences of time; and advancing new modes of analysis more appropriate to those aspects and modes of musicking ignored by traditional methods. Contributors include, in overlapping categories, many fellow pioneers, current colleagues, and former students, and their essays, like McClary's own work, address a wide range of repertories ranging from the established canon to a variety of popular genres. The collection represents the generational arrival of the 'new' musicology into full maturity, dividing fairly evenly between pre-eminent scholars of music and a group of younger scholars who have already made their mark in significant ways. But the collection is also, and fundamentally, interdisciplinary in nature, in active conversation with such fields as history, anthropology, philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, dramatic criticism, women's studies, and cultural studies.

Raymond Knapp is Professor in the Musicology Faculty at UCLA, USA. Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick are both Assistant Professors in the Department of Music at Dalhousie University, Canada.

Contents: Tribute to Susan McClary, Rose Rosengard Subotnik; Introduction, Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp and Jacqueline Warwick. Part I Musical Identities: Gender Sexuality and Race: Value and meaning in The Magic Flute, Lawrence Kramer; Whirling fanatics: orientalism, politics, and religious rivalry in western operatic representation of the orient, Nasser Al-Taee; Reveling in the rubble: where is the love?, George Lipsitz; 'Waltz me round again Willie': gender, ideology and the waltz in the Gilded Age, Steven Baur; 'And the colored girls sing': backup singers and the case of the Blossoms, Jacqueline Warwick; The universe will tell you what it needs: being, time, Sondheim, Paul Attinello. Part II Music and Temporality: Making time - the soundtrack and narrative time, Daniel Goldmark; Sleights of time in the music of Cassandra Wilson, Charles Hiroshi Garrett; Temporal turntables: on temporality and corporeality in dance culture, Stan Hawkins; Resisting the sublime: loose synchronization in La Belle et la Bête and The Dark Side of Oz, John Richardson; Of railroads, Beethoven and Victorian modernity, Ruth A. Solie; Marking time in Pacific Overtures: reconciling East, West and history within the theatrical now of a Broadway musical, Raymond Knapp. Part III Reinventing Analysis: 3 little essays on evanescence, Mitchell Morris; Gender sonics: the voice of Patsy Cline, Richard Leppert; Shoddy equipment for living? Deconstructing Tin Pan Alley song, Rose Rosengard Subotnik; Musicology beyond the score and the performance: making sense of the creak on Miles Davis's 'Old Folks', David Atke; Uninvited: gender, schizophrenia and Alanis Morissette, Robert Walker; Index.