Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900

In Music as Cultural Practice, Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society.

In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces...