Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception - Tapa dura

'Among the year's most stimulating reading material' The Observer

'This is an important book, crowded ... with new ideas and arguments that challenge many of our assumptions.' The Musical Times

' ... most rewarding ... As a collection of humanistic scholarship that amplifies the best sociological tradition ... it is highly recommended.' Contemporary Sociology

This provocative volume of essays is now available in paperback. The contributors to this volume - musicologists, sociologists, cultural theorists - all challenge the view that music occupies an autonomous aesthetic sphere. Recently, socially and politically grounded enterprises such as feminism, semiotics and deconstruction have effected a major transformation in the ways in which the arts and humanities are studied, leading in turn to a systematic investigation of the implicit assumptions underlying the critical methods of the last two hundred years. Influenced by these approaches, the writers here question a prevailing ideology that insists there is a division between music and society and examine the ways in which the two do in fact interact and mediate one another within and across socio-cultural boundaries.