TY - BOOK ID - 30058634 TI - Listening to reason : culture, subjectivity, and nineteenth-century music PY - 2006 SN - 069112616X 9780691126166 9786612936388 1400835739 1282936387 9781400835737 0691116857 9780691116853 PB - Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock : Princeton University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Subjectivity in music. KW - Music KW - History and criticism. KW - 19th century KW - History and criticism KW - Subjectivity in music KW - Music. KW - 1800-1899. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:30058634 AB - This pathbreaking work reveals the pivotal role of music--musical works and musical culture--in debates about society, self, and culture that forged European modernity through the "long nineteenth century." Michael Steinberg argues that, from the late 1700's to the early 1900's, music not only reflected but also embodied modern subjectivity as it increasingly engaged and criticized old regimes of power, belief, and representation. His purview ranges from Mozart to Mahler, and from the sacred to the secular, including opera as well as symphonic and solo instrumental music. Defining subjectivity as the experience rather than the position of the "I," Steinberg argues that music's embodiment of subjectivity involved its apparent capacity to "listen" to itself, its past, its desires. Nineteenth-century music, in particular music from a north German Protestant sphere, inspired introspection in a way that the music and art of previous periods, notably the Catholic baroque with its emphasis on the visual, did not. The book analyzes musical subjectivity initially from Mozart through Mendelssohn, then seeks it, in its central chapter, in those aspects of Wagner that contradict his own ideological imperialism, before finally uncovering its survival in the post-Wagnerian recovery from musical and other ideologies. Engagingly written yet theoretically sophisticated, Listening to Reason represents a startlingly original corrective to cultural history's long-standing inhibition to engage with music while presenting a powerful alternative vision of the modern.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. ER -