Jason Geary – författare

Revived with new intensity at the end of the twentieth century, questions of meaning and interpretation in music continue to generate widespread interest and give rise to new research directions and methods. This collection of essays brings together leading musicologists and music theorists working across a range of genres--classical, jazz, and popular--to offer fresh perspectives on a concern that bestrides every area of musical scholarship.While many accounts of musical meaning tend to limit and constrain, Musical Meaning and Interpretation contends that music's capacity to mean is virtually limitless and therefore resists clean and orderly taxonomies. Taken together, the essays attest to this nearly infinite variety of ways in which music may mean. Individually, they explore the intellectual underpinnings of rotational form, the mysterious agencies that populate our hermeneutic discourse, and the significance of pleasure in the interpretive act, among other topics, along with extended discussions of music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Rooted in humanistic values, the essays combine rich analytical insights with critical perspectives on meaning and hermeneutics, arguing collectively for the strength, necessity, and urgency of interpretive work in music.

Revived with new intensity at the end of the twentieth century, questions of meaning and interpretation in music continue to generate widespread interest and give rise to new research directions and methods. This collection of essays brings together leading musicologists and music theorists working across a range of genres--classical, jazz, and popular--to offer fresh perspectives on a concern that bestrides every area of musical scholarship. While many accounts of musical meaning tend to limit and constrain, Musical Meaning and Interpretation contends that music's capacity to mean is virtually limitless and therefore resists clean and orderly taxonomies. Taken together, the essays attest to this nearly infinite variety of ways in which music may mean. Individually, they explore the intellectual underpinnings of rotational form, the mysterious agencies that populate our hermeneutic discourse, and the significance of pleasure in the interpretive act, among other topics, along with extended discussions of music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Rooted in humanistic values, the essays combine rich analytical insights with critical perspectives on meaning and hermeneutics, arguing collectively for the strength, necessity, and urgency of interpretive work in music.

Revived with new intensity at the end of the twentieth century, questions of meaning and interpretation in music continue to generate widespread interest and give rise to new research directions and methods. This collection of essays brings together leading musicologists and music theorists working across a range of genres--classical, jazz, and popular--to offer fresh perspectives on a concern that bestrides every area of musical scholarship. While many accounts of musical meaning tend to limit and constrain, Musical Meaning and Interpretation contends that music's capacity to mean is virtually limitless and therefore resists clean and orderly taxonomies. Taken together, the essays attest to this nearly infinite variety of ways in which music may mean. Individually, they explore the intellectual underpinnings of rotational form, the mysterious agencies that populate our hermeneutic discourse, and the significance of pleasure in the interpretive act, among other topics, along with extended discussions of music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Rooted in humanistic values, the essays combine rich analytical insights with critical perspectives on meaning and hermeneutics, arguing collectively for the strength, necessity, and urgency of interpretive work in music.

The Politics of Appropriation uncovers a largely forgotten chapter in music history by considering the intersection of music and Hellenism in nineteenth-century Germany. While the influence of Greece on the literature, art, architecture, and philosophy of this period has been much discussed, its significance for music has received considerably less attention. Beginning in 1841 with Felix Mendelssohn''s wildly popular score for the groundbreaking Prussian court production of Sophocles'' Antigone, author Jason Geary draws on research from the fields of musicology, history, classical studies, and theater studies, to explore the trend of combining music and Greek tragedy that also included productions of Euripides'' Medea, Sophocles'' Oedipus at Colonus, and Sophocles'' celebrated Oedipus the King with music by Wilhelm Taubert, Mendelssohn, and Franz Lachner, respectively. Staged at royal courts in Berlin and Munich, these productions reflect an effort by the rulers who commissioned them to appropriate the legacy of Greece for the creation of a German cultural and national identity, while the music involved seemed to its contemporaries to mark the advent of an entirely new Romantic genre. By drawing a line between these compositions and Wagner''s very different approach to recovering classical tragedy, Geary offers a reassessment of the composer''s reception of the Greeks, highlighting the degree to which he was reacting against works such as Mendelssohn''s Antigone when he called for the creation of a music drama rooted in the spirit of Attic tragedy. Geary further argues that Wagner''s Ring cycle can be understood as the composer''s attempt to reclaim the mythic significance of the Oedipus myth in the service of his own aesthetic aims. Placing these developments within the context of Germany''s longstanding obsession with Greece, The Politics of Appropriation demonstrates the enduring significance of antiquity as a trope that helped to shape the European cultural and artistic landscape of the nineteenth century.