Thought of Music

“As ever, Lawrence Kramer is unequaled in his ability to write with wit and lucidity on complex matters of interpretation that can so often leave students of musicology with a feeling of numbness in the brain. The Thought of Music completes a trilogy of outstanding monographs on musical meaning, musical expression, and music’s relationship to language.”—Derek B. Scott, author of Musical Style and Social Meaning “The Thought of Music shows us Lawrence Kramer at his best: provocative, intense, philosophical, and hermeneutic. Kramer takes on musicology’s current trends and bugaboos—from performance studies to cultural contexts to music as ineffable—and reimagines them from his magisterially critical perspective. We see what it is like to think in, through, and with music, not as some transcendent object that prohibits thought but as the vehicle that sparks it. Kramer develops a virtual newer musicology.”—Michael L. Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject“Thinking about music, and—more to the point—thinking through music over the past thirty years is well and appropriately anchored in the writing of Lawrence Kramer. Indeed, it’s safe to say that musicology has very considerably rethought its project, and is much the better for it, on account of Kramer’s consistently stunning work. The Thought of Music thinks hard about how and why musical thought needed to change, and still does. The book, intellectually magisterial, is beautifully written, supremely well argued, and anchored in what actually happens in musical works. By no means least, Kramer articulates the stakes—for musical understanding and music’s myriad social and cultural agencies—that append to the thinking about music. I’d be hard put to recommend any book that accomplishes this increasingly urgent task more convincingly.”—Richard Leppert, author of Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature