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Recent Books on Music

Lawrence Kramer’s contribution to this issue of MQ deals with the character and direction the analysis of music might take, particularly with regard to the understanding of music as a dimension of culture and history. Indeed, this entire issue of MQ puts forward readings of music that connect music with the so-called “extramusical.” The issue starts with a continuation of the long-standing discussion of constructs of democracy and religion in the work of Charles Ives. An essay on the historical context for understanding Native American music follows, and after that a socio-historical analysis of Stockhausen’s role in Darmstadt in 1968. Following Kramer’s piece, we close the issue with a quite novel look at a late-eighteenth-century subculture—journalism in Vienna directed at women—and its relation to Mozart’s comic operas. Over the years MQ has sought to encourage the disciplined analysis of music as a phenomenon defined not as purely self-referential in meaning, nor as autonomously dynamic in its patterns of historical development. The editors are therefore justly proud of the recent publication by our colleague Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason (Princeton University Press). We congratulate him on this fine and original volume. Speaking of books, there are several recent volumes that deserve notice. First, there is R. Larry Todd’s magisterial biography of Mendelssohn (Oxford University Press). This long-awaited, massive biography will serve for years as the standard account of Mendelssohn’s life and work. Second, there is the excellent collection by Ruth A. Solie entitled Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (California University Press); readers will be particularly interested in Solie’s brilliant essay on George Eliot and the novel Daniel Deronda. Third is the welcome publication of a collection of writings by the late Robert Shaw, edited by Robert Blocker. The Robert Shaw Reader (Yale University Press) will prove invaluable to those interested in choral music and choral conducting. And then there are the several volumes about Shostakovich that have appeared: Solomon Volkov’s book on Shostakovich and Stalin (Knopf), Malcolm Brown’s A Shostakovich Casebook (Indiana University Press), and Laurel E. Fay’s Shostakovich and His World (Princeton University Press).