The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism - Hardcover

Críticas

"A delightful collection of 100 items of musical commentary dating across the centuries. . . . Eminently readable and thoroughly informative."--Library Journal

"A beautifully collected and annotated anthology of occasional writings about music--reviews, not lectures; speculations, not theories. . . . Writing criticism of any kind is a peculiar thing to do; writing criticism of music, which is not only a non-verbal art, but one that won't stand still, is nearly impossible. . . . I was astonished and grateful that Haskell had been able to track down so many sparkling reviews, and so many casual references. . . . The readers of The Attentive Listener will find themselves not only touched and amused, but strangely awakened and re-charged by it. I recommend it to anybody who likes music and wants to like it yet again."--Reed Woodhouse, The Boston Book Review

Reseña del editor

This historical anthology shows the evolution of music journalism and its place in Western culture over the past three centuries and illustrates the richness, variety, and vitality of music criticism as both an intellectual enterprise and a literary genre. Because little music criticism in foreign languages is accessible to English-speaking readers, Harry Haskell has made a special point of exemplifying regional traditions of critical writing from throughout the Western world. Included in The Attentive Listener are articles not only from England, Western Europe, and the United States, but also from Russia, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Latin America, and Canada. Each of the one hundred articles here relates to one or more topics of central importance in music history, such as the nature of musical taste and criticism, operatic reform, cultural nationalism, the value of tradition, and the impact of modern technologies on composers, performers, and audiences.

The Attentive Listener differs from previous anthologies of musical writings in its emphasis on journalistic criticism, its broadly international scope, and the thematic organization of the articles, most of which have not been translated or anthologized before. The writers represented include not only professional critics and scholars but also composers such as Debussy, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Janacek, and Virgil Thomson, and literary figures such as Heine, Boito, and Shaw.