Writing through Music

Jann Pasler, music scholar, documentary filmmaker, and pianist, is Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where she founded the graduate program Critical Studies and Experimental Practices (CSEP). She has published widely on French and American contemporary music, modernism and postmodernism, cultural life in France and the French colonies. Recent books: Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France and, as editor/author, Saint-Saëns and his World. She is currently completing Music, Race, and Colonialism in the French Empire, 1860s--1950s as well as a book, in French, on music ethnography from Indochina to Central Africa.

The astonishingly wide-ranging and trenchant essays in Jann Pasler's Writing Through Music are united by their passionate engagement in the history, theory, and criticism of Modernist and Postmodernist musics. Pasler's stated aim-"to flesh out the contingencies and rich complexity of the particular moments in which music was conceived, created, performed, and heard," is admirably realized in this collection. Throughout, Pasler displays a dazzling command of scholarship and archival research, and she has assembled a wealth of materials that support her arguments. Reading Writing Through Music is an exhilarating experience.

• Foreword by George E. Lewis ; Introduction ; Part I: Time, Narrative, and Memory ; 1. Narrative and Narrativity in Music ; 2. Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory ; 3. Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents ; Part II: Self-Fashioning ; 4. Deconstructing d'Indy, or the Problem of the Composer's Reputation ; 5. New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Cocteau's Identity ; 6. Inventing a Tradition: John Cage's "Composition in Retrospect" ; Part III: Identity and Nation ; 7. Pelleas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera ; 8. The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmes ; 9. Race, Orientalism, and Distinction in the Wake of the "Yellow Peril" ; Part IV: Patrons and Patronage ; 10. Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation ; 11. The Political Economy of Composition in the American University, 1965-1985 ; Part V: The Everyday Life of the Past ; 12. Concert Programs and Their Narratives as Emblems of Ideology ; 13. Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the "Popular" in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music ; Appendices ; Appendix 1. Definitions of Terminology Used in Chapter 1 ; Appendix 2. Public Performances and Publications of Music by Augusta Holmes ; Appendix 3. Relationship between NEA Support and Composers' Educational Background ; Appendix 4. Relationship between NEA Support and Composers' Institutional Affiliation ; Appendix 5. Educational Background and Institutional Affiliation of Most Frequent NEA Panelists ; Appendix 6. Winners of Largest NEA Composer Grants Each Year, 1973-1985 ; Index