Hermeneutics and musical history: a primer without rules, an exercise with Schubert -- Hands on, lights off: the Moonlight Sonata and the birth of sex at the piano -- Beyond words and music: an essay on songfulness -- Franz Liszt and the virtuoso public sphere: sight and sound in the rise of mass entertainment -- Rethinking Schumann's Carnaval: identity, meaning, and the social order -- Glottis envy: the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera -- Hercules' hautboys: mixed media and musical meaning -- The voice of Persephone: musical meaning and mixed media -- Powers of blackness: jazz and the blues in modern concert music -- Long ride in a slow machine: the alienation effect from Weill to Shostakovich -- Chiaroscuro: Coltrane's American songbook -- Ghost stories: cultural memory, mourning, and the myth of originality
Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of the controversial new musicology, integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues. This book continues and deepens the trajectory of Kramer's thinking as it argues that humanistic meaning is a basic force in music history
