The semiotic elements of a multiplanar discourse : John Harbison's setting of Michael Fried's "depths" / Claudia Stanger -- Whose life? : the gendered self in Schumann's Frauenliebe songs / Ruth A. Solie -- Operatic madness : a challenge to convention / Ellen Rosand -- Commentary : form, reference, and ideology in musical discourse / Hayden White.

Over the last dozen years, the writings of Richard Taruskin have transformed the debate about "early music" and "authenticity." Text and Act collects for the first time the most important of Taruskin's essays and reviews from this period, many of which now classics in the field. Taking a wide-ranging cultural view of the phenomenon, he shows that the movement, far from reviving ancient traditions, in fact represents the only truly modern style of performance being offered today. He goes on to contend that the movement is therefore far more valuable and even authentic than the historical verisimilitude for which it ostensibly strives could ever be. These essays cast fresh light on many aspects of contemporary music-making and music-thinking, mixing lighthearted debunking with impassioned argumentation. Taruskin ranges from theoretical speculation to practical criticism, and covers a repertory spanning from Bach to Stravinsky. Including a newly written introduction, Text and Act collects the very best of one of our most incisive musical thinkers.

Essays on semiology

Explores the roles that translation plays in a musical context, questioning the transference of sense between music and text.

On the unique meaning-making of image-text art In a series of textual and photographic essays, writer and editor Catherine Taylor explores our encounters with the intersection of the visual and the verbal. Taylor riffs on and subverts Roland Barthes' classic 1977 essay collection, Image Music Text, using his title as a playful point of departure for her thinking about the nature of image-text works and the music being made at their intersection. Taylor rejects overarching statements about medium or genre in favor of observing the particular to reveal broader ways of reading that are both familiar and disorientating. These reflections are at once critical and celebratory, dystopian and utopian, investigative and contemplative, didactic and dreamlike. They are imaginings of the world which ask: as we shuttle between linguistic and visual modes of meaning-making, what is the purpose of reinventing forms if not to reinvent ways of living? The author of You, Me, and the Violence, Apart and Giving Birth, Catherine Taylor (born 1964) is a founding editor of Essay Press, and an associate professor in writing at Ithaca College, where she codirects the Image Text MFA. She is also a codirector of ITI Press.

Seeking to understand youth culture through its visual and musical expression, In Garageland presents a pioneering ethnographic study of rock bands and their fans. Topics include class as well as sexual conflicts; mainstream and deviant subcultures, and the complex social, psychological and ethical relationships which exist within youth culture. In Garageland develops the notion of youth culture research as a way of mirroring our grown-up identities and of staking out the limits of late modern culture in general.

The purpose of this volume is to: (1) establish the importance of music--especially in Luther's early life, in his education in the schools, and in his life in the monastery--in shaping his understanding of the role of music in the Christian life; (2) show how Luther's developing understanding of music in Christian life and worship led him to a practical and many-faceted involvement in a variety of music's aspects; (3) bring into sharp relief several distinct paradigms, or patterns of thought, that dominated Luther's theological understanding of the role of music in the church's life and ministry.