Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University and the author of numerous books. His trilogy on musical understanding includes Interpreting Music, Expression and Truth, and The Thought of Music. He is also a prizewinning composer.

"The volume is essential; the issues under study here remain vital, and the author enunciates them clearly ... Summing up: recommended." CHOICE "Kramer has been hugely successful in creating a community of formalist and hermeneutic analytical discourse that has inspired a new generation of thinkers to question music's inherent meaning and value in contemporary society... a hugely important and timely work that should no doubt become the focus of much future work and pedagogy." Notes

• Preface: The Thought of Music Acknowledgments 1 * Music and the Forms of Thought 2 * Speaking of Music: In Search of an Idiom 3 * The Ineffable and How (Not) to Say It 4 * Pleasure and Valuation 5 * The Cultural Field: Beyond Context 6 * Virtuosity, Reading, Authorship: A Genealogy 7 * The Newer Musicology? Context, Performance, and the Musical Work Postscript: Imagining the Score Notes Index of Names Index of Concepts