Michael Steinberg – författare

Michael Steinberg's 1996 volume The Symphony: A Reader's Guide received glowing reviews across America. It was hailed as "wonderfully clear...recommended warmly to music lovers on all levels" (Washington Post), "informed and thoughtful" (Chicago Tribune), and "composed by a master stylist" (San Francisco Chronicle). Seiji Ozawa wrote that "his beautiful and effortless prose speaks from the heart." Michael Tilson Thomas called The Symphony "an essential book for any concertgoer." Now comes the companion volume--The Concerto: A Listener's Guide. In this marvelous book, Steinberg discusses over 120 works, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1720s to John Adams in 1994. Readers will find here the heart of the standard repertory, among them Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, eighteen of Mozart's piano concertos, all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and major works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Bruch, Dvora'k, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Strauss, and Rachmaninoff. The book also provides luminous introductions to the achievement of twentieth-century masters such as Arnold Schoenberg, Be'la Barto'k, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Steinberg examines the work of these musical giants with unflagging enthusiasm and bright style. He is a master of capturing the expressive, dramatic, and emotional values of the music and of conveying the historical and personal context in which these wondrous works were composed. His writing blends impeccable scholarship, deeply felt love of music, and entertaining whimsy.

Michael Steinberg's 1996 volume The Symphony: A Reader's Guide received glowing reviews across America. It was hailed as "wonderfully clear...recommended warmly to music lovers on all levels" (Washington Post), "informed and thoughtful" (Chicago Tribune), and "composed by a master stylist" (San Francisco Chronicle). Seiji Ozawa wrote that "his beautiful and effortless prose speaks from the heart." Michael Tilson Thomas called The Symphony "an essential book for any concertgoer." Now comes the companion volume--The Concerto: A Listener's Guide. In this marvelous book, Steinberg discusses over 120 works, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1720s to John Adams in 1994. Readers will find here the heart of the standard repertory, among them Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, eighteen of Mozart's piano concertos, all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and major works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Bruch, Dvora'k, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Strauss, and Rachmaninoff. The book also provides luminous introductions to the achievement of twentieth-century masters such as Arnold Schoenberg, Be'la Barto'k, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Elliott Carter. Steinberg examines the work of these musical giants with unflagging enthusiasm and bright style. He is a master of capturing the expressive, dramatic, and emotional values of the music and of conveying the historical and personal context in which these wondrous works were composed. His writing blends impeccable scholarship, deeply felt love of music, and entertaining whimsy.

The Fourth Genre offers the most comprehensive, teachable, and current introduction available today to the cutting-edge, evolving genre of creative nonfiction.  While acknowledging the literary impulse of nonfiction to be a fourth genre equivalent to poetry, fiction, and drama, this text focuses on subgenres of the nonfiction form, including memoir, nature writing, personal essays, literary journalism, cultural criticism, and travel writing.

 

This anthology was the first to draw on the common ground of the practicing writer and the practical scholar and to make the pedagogical connections between creative writing practice and composition theory, bridging some of the gaps between the teaching of composition, creative writing, and literature in English departments.

This study provides a fresh look at the debate between science and religion that documents how the experiences produced by spiritual practice are surprisingly consistent with the findings of modern biology, despite the difficulty in reconciling scientific theories and religious dogma.This book is unique in its focus on bodily experience as an independent source of knowledge and insight, an important aspect of recent discoveries in neurology and psychology. By rethinking what it is to be human and what role self-consciousness plays, it finds striking points of intersection between science and religion and challenges readers to rediscover their spiritual connections to the physical world.Combining scientific rigor with the spiritual quest, A New Biology of Religion: Spiritual Practice and the Life of the Body reframes the science-religion debate. This profound work examines how all things are connected—both scientifically and spiritually—and shows how religious practices mirror the biological processes of life.

In this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics—of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical, writes Steinberg. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals and their own reconstitutions. Motivated in part by recent reactionary insurgencies in the US, Europe, and Israel, this astute work of intellectual history posits the critique of myths of origin as a key principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship, of their endurance as well as their fragility.

In this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics—of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical, writes Steinberg. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals and their own reconstitutions. Motivated in part by recent reactionary insurgencies in the US, Europe, and Israel, this astute work of intellectual history posits the critique of myths of origin as a key principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship, of their endurance as well as their fragility.

Discarding once and for all the discredited Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body, Steinberg considers the consequences of current research in neurology and cognitive science that show that people think with their bodies and in interaction with others. He considers the ways that the structures of daily experience in capitalist societies reinforce th

Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.

Presents Wagner as a serious philosopher and offers a fresh perspective on the Ring and its unique fusion of myth, human drama, and philosophical insight.Few figures of the nineteenth century were more influential than Richard Wagner, and few works of art have the scope and historical significance of The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner himself said that it expressed his entire philosophy of life. Yet little attention has been paid to him as a philosopher, aesthetic theories aside. Instead, the Ring has been viewed in the light of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or even Hegel. Wagner's own ideas do not deserve this neglect, and this book addresses that omission. It starts with the more widely read philosophers of his day, such as Fichte; in their context Wagner's often fragmentary thoughts reveal a coherent "materialist idealism" that constitutes a late but significant contribution to Classical German philosophy. His acute social and psychological insights are still relevant, and so is the philosophical history that he saw prefigured in Greek tragedy.Wagner's philosophy also illuminates the structure of the Ring and offers fresh insights into the characters and conflicts of that endlessly interpretable work. Approachable and engagingly written, balancing narrative, philosophical analysis, and a detailed consideration of the Ring's four music dramas, The Philosopher's Ring shows the cycle to be a work of unparalleled philosophical depth, one reason that it continues to challenge audiences even now, a century and a half after its premiere.

For most of the eighteenth century the best minds in Europe took up the task of providing a foundation for human life and human society in which individual fulfillment was to be achieved within a rational public order. When it became apparent that this task was based on an illusionthe separation of self and worldand was thus doomed to failure, however, that insight and the consequent crisis were forgotten and repressed. After 1815 all parties, reactionary and liberal, chose to proceed as if we had achieved what we knew, somewhere, we could not carry off. To secure that false confidence the challenges of the late Enlightenment had to be silenced and its doubts swept under the carpet. This book concerns a founding act of bad faith and of willed blindness, the self-forgetting of the rootlessness and the falsity of the basic presuppositions of the modern world, that have haunted that world from its birth. Enlightenment Interrupted takes the metaphysical arguments of the idealists seriously. Its methodological foundation is the belief that in every era there are deep structures of thought and experience that define the range of theoretical and political possibilities available.The great achievement of the post-Kantian generation was to critique and ultimately to move beyond the self-world dichotomy at the heart of Western thought. This can be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment project of subjecting everything to the test of reason, but it was also part of a larger cultural movement that found expression in Romanticism, in an openness to Indian and other non-Western thought, and in the political and social experimentation of the French Revolution. What followed in the post-Revolutionary years was not a development of those tendencies to openness and egalitarian, common process but a retreat to the opposition of self and world and a drastic reduction in intellectual and social possibilities. This is one source of the collective impotence that sees the twenty-first century in a lockstep march to disaster.