Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Institutional dimensions and the contexts of listening
- 1 Music and literature: the institutional dimensions
- 2 Privileging the moment of reception: music and radio in South Africa
- 3 Chord and discourse: listening through the written word
- Part II Literary models for musical understanding: music, lyric, narrative, and metaphor
- Part III Representation, analysis, and semiotics
- Part IV Gender and convention
- Index
3 - Chord and discourse: listening through the written word
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Institutional dimensions and the contexts of listening
- 1 Music and literature: the institutional dimensions
- 2 Privileging the moment of reception: music and radio in South Africa
- 3 Chord and discourse: listening through the written word
- Part II Literary models for musical understanding: music, lyric, narrative, and metaphor
- Part III Representation, analysis, and semiotics
- Part IV Gender and convention
- Index
Summary
In an admirably pugnacious essay dealing with such matters as dust-jackets and Cliff's Notes, Gerald Graff argues that “‘texts in themselves’ … have become harder to distinguish from the interpretations made of them” because they “come to us ‘always already’ pre-screened, so that we often know what texts mean before reading them.” I would like to make a related argument about listening – about the ways that music is implicated in a network of discursive practices so powerful that the very notion of “the music itself” becomes problematic. But lest it float away in theoretical abstractions, let me anchor my argument in a concrete cultural juxtaposition that I call the “purity and parasite” phenomenon. This was crystallized in a strange conjunction that marked the recording scene in the late 1980s: just as Christopher Hogwood began to extend his purifications (“authentic” performances with period instruments and performance practice) to the symphonies of Beethoven, Harmonia Mundi released the first complete cycle of those same symphonies in the notoriously impure piano transcriptions by Franz Liszt. This was not an isolated coincidence. For some time, we have been deluged with recordings that try to get back to the composer's original intentions (and I would include here not only period performances of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but also recordings of the “first versions” of the Bruckner symphonies).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Music and TextCritical Inquiries, pp. 38 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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