What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

A world-renowned scholar and musician helps Christians respond with theological discernment to music.

Resounding Transcendence is a pathbreaking set of ethnographic and historical essays by leading scholars exploring the ways sacred music effects cultural, political, and religious transitions in the contemporary world. With chapters covering Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist practices in East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Europe, the volume establishes the theoretical and methodological foundations for music scholarship to engage in current debates about modern religion and secular epistemologies. It also transforms those debates through sophisticated, nuanced treatments of sound and music - ubiquitous elements of ritual and religion often glossed over in other disciplines. Resounding Transcendence confronts the relationship of sound, divinity, and religious practice in diverse post-secular contexts. By examining the immanence of transcendence in specific social and historical contexts and rethinking the reified nature of "religion" and "world religions," these authors examine the dynamics of difference and transition within and between sacred musical practices. The work in this volume transitions between traditional spaces of sacred musical practice and emerging public spaces for popular religious performance; between the transformative experience of ritual and the sacred musical affordances of media technologies; between the charisma of individual performers and the power of the marketplace; and between the making of authenticity and hybridity in religious repertoires and practices. Broad in scope, rich in ethnographic and historical detail, and theoretically ambitious, Resounding Transcendence is an essential contribution to the study of music and religion.

Mahler's Voices brings together a close reading of the renowned composer's music with wide-ranging cultural and historical interpretation, unique in being a study not of Mahler's works as such but of Mahler's musical style.

This book explores a provocative area of inquiry for critical theory and research into world politics and popular culture: music. Not just because political science barely engages with anything musical, but also because it is clear that many opportunities for critical scholarship and reflection on global politics and economics are present in the spaces and relationships created by organized sound. It is easy to focus on the textual elements of music, but there is more at stake than just the words. Critical reflection on the intersections between music and politics also need to take into account the visceral and non-verbal elements such as counterpoint and harmony, polyphony and dissonance, noise, rhymes, rhythms, performance and the visual/aural dimensions to music-making.

Censorship had an extraordinary impact on Alban Berg's opera Lulu, composed by the Austrian during the politically tumultuous years spanning 1929 to 1935. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind that were repeatedly banned from publishing and performing up until the end of World War I, thelibretto was in turn censored by Berg himself when he submitted it to authorities in Nazi Germany in 1934. When Berg died before the opera was debuted the next season, the third act was censored by his widow, Helene, and his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.In "Taken By the Devil", author Margaret Notley uncovers the unusual and uniquely generative role of censorship throughout the lifecycle of Berg's great opera. Placing the opera and its source material in a wider cultural context, Notley provides close readings of the opera's libretto and score toreveal the precise techniques employed by the composer in negotiating the censors. She goes on to explore the ways Berg chose to augment rather than flatten the discrepancies between various performances of the earlier plays and the opera itself, adding further dimensions of interpretation to thework. Elegantly readable, "Taken by the Devil" is the most meticulously researched and nuanced study of Lulu to date, and illuminates the process of politically-driven censorship of theater, music, and the arts during the tumultuous early twentieth century.