The sight of sound: music, representation, and the history of the body

Abstract

"Richard Leppert boldly examines the social meanings of music as these have been shaped not only by hearing but also by seeing music in performance. His purview is the northern European bourgeoisie, principally in England and the Low Countries, from 1600 to 1900. And his particular interest is the relation of music to the human body. He argues that musical practices, invariably linked to the body, are inseparable from the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality."--Pub. desc.

Contents

1. Music as a sight in the production of musical meaning -- 2. Desire, power, and the sonoric landscape (early modernism and the politics of musical privacy) -- 3. The poetics of anguish, pleasure, and prestige (hoarding sound in a culture of silence) -- 4. Social order and the domestic consumption of music (the politics of sound in the policing of gender construction) -- 5. Music, domesticity, and cultural imperialism -- 6. Sexual identity, death, and the family piano in the nineteenth century -- 7. The piano, misogyny, and "the Kreutzer sonata" -- 8. Male agony : awakening conscience -- 9. Aspiring to the condition of silence (the iconicity of music).