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The story of Ludwig van Beethoven’s confronting his growing deafness as he continued to compose and conduct has always provided special inspiration for me that transcends his music. Whenever I listen to his compositions, I hear more than notes exquisitely written and performed. I hear the voice of a fellow human being who is overcoming trauma, adversity and fear through his art, whispering to me n...

Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—“interpreting music” in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning—even the very concept of music—while breaking do...

What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? The Thought of Music grapples directly with these fundamental questions—questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. In this third volume in a trilogy on musical understanding that includes Interpreting Music and Express...

In Music as Cultural Practice, Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society.In Kramer's analysis, ...

The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accor...

Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence an...

A leading cultural theorist and musicologist opens up new possibilities for understanding mainstream Western art music—the "classical" music composed between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries that is, for many, losing both its prestige and its appeal. When this music is regarded esoterically, removed from real-world interests, it increasingly sounds more evasive than transcendent. Now L...

This elegantly written book is a bold attempt to reinterpret the nature of sexual violence and to imagine the possibility of overcoming it. Lawrence Kramer traces today's sexual identities to their nineteenth-century sources, drawing on the music, literature, and thought of the period to show how normal identity both promotes and rationalizes violence against women.To make his case, Kramer uses op...

How have romantic narratives involving Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata affected how we hear this famous piece? How does John Coltrane's African American identity affect the way we hear him perform a relatively "white" pop standard like "My Favorite Things"? Why does music requiring great virtuosity have different cultural meanings than music that is not particularly virtuosic? From classical to jaz...

“What can be done about the state of classical music?” Lawrence Kramer asks in this elegant, sharply observed, and beautifully written extended essay. Classical music, whose demise has been predicted for at least a decade, has always had its staunch advocates, but in today’s media-saturated world there are real concerns about its viability. Why Classical Music Still Matters takes a forthright appr...