Andrew Dell'Antonio – författare

For nearly 70 years, The Enjoyment of Music has led the way in preparing students for a lifetime of listening to great music and understanding its cultural and historical context. The Fourteenth Edition expands on this foundation with new chapters and features that add many voices to its already rich repertoire.

For nearly 70 years, The Enjoyment of Music has led the way in preparing students for a lifetime of listening to great music and understanding its cultural and historical context. The Fourteenth Edition expands on this foundation with new chapters and features that add many voices to its already rich repertoire.

In a highly influential essay, Rose Rosengard Subotnik critiques "structural listening" as an attempt to situate musical meaning solely within the unfolding of the musical structure itself. The authors of this volume, prominent young music historians and theorists writing on repertories ranging from Beethoven to MTV, take up Subotnik's challenge in what is likely to be one of musical scholarship's intellectual touchstones for many years to come. Original, innovative, and sophisticated, their essays explore not only the implications of the "structural listening" model but also the alternative listening strategies that have developed in specific communities, often in response to twentieth-century Western music.

The early seventeenth century, when the first operas were written and technical advances with far-reaching consequences - such as tonal music - began to develop, is also notable for another shift: the displacement of aristocratic music-makers by a new professional class of performers. In this book, Andrew Dell'Antonio looks at a related phenomenon: the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing. Drawing from contemporaneous discourses and other commentaries on music, the visual arts, and Church doctrine, Dell'Antonio links the new ideas about cultivated listening with other intellectual trends of the period: humanistic learning, contemplative listening (or watching) as an active spiritual practice, and musical mysticism as an ideal promoted by the Church as part of the Catholic Reformation.