Music at the Limits
by Edward W. Said
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Music at the Limits is the first book to bring together three decades of Edward W. Said's essays and articles on music. Addressing the work of a variety of composers, musicians, and performers, Said carefully draws out music's social, political, and cultural contexts and, as a classically trained pianist, provides rich and often surprising assessments of classical music and opera. Music at the Limits offers both a fresh perspective on canonical pieces and a celebration of neglected works by show more contemporary composers. Said faults the Metropolitan Opera in New York for being too conservative and laments the way in which opera superstars like Pavarotti have "reduced opera performance to a minimum of intelligence and a maximum of overproduced noise." He also reflects on the censorship of Wagner in Israel; the worrisome trend of proliferating music festivals; an opera based on the life of Malcolm X; the relationship between music and feminism; the pianist Glenn Gould; and the works of Mozart, Bach, Richard Strauss, and others. Said wrote his incisive critiques as both an insider and an authority. He saw music as a reflection of his ideas on literature and history and paid close attention to its composition and creative possibilities. Eloquent and surprising, Music at the Limits preserves an important dimension of Said's brilliant intellectual work and cements his reputation as one of the most influential and groundbreaking scholars of the twentieth century. show lessTags
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I was introduced to Edward Said many years ago at university, in which I found his works insightful and uniquely eye-opening among the pack of academics. Later I found that not only was Edward Said a great scholar, writer, but also a great lover of music. In this book I've found that Said was a big fan of Glenn Gould, endlessly talked on topics of opera (not my personal forte, I prefer instrumental music), and plenty of interesting discussions, reviews, and critiques on composers, conductors, pianists, and other musical events, contemporaries. This is an amazing book fortune of insights on music that are must for the ardent musician and the amateur fans of the world of Classical music.
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105+ Works 16,734 Members
Born in Jerusalem and educated at Victoria College in Cairo and at Princeton and Harvard universities, Edward Said has taught at Columbia University since 1963 and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. He has had an unusual dual career as a professor of comparative literature, a recognized expert on the novelist show more and short story writer Joseph Conrad, (see Vol. 1) and as one of the most significant contemporary writers on the Middle East, especially the Palestinian question and the plight of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Although he is not a trained historian, his Orientalism (1978) is one of the most stimulating critical evaluations of traditional Western writing on Middle Eastern history, societies, and literature. In the controversial Covering Islam (1981), he examined how the Western media have biased Western perspectives on the Middle East. A Palestinian by birth, Said has sought to show how Palestinian history differs from the rest of Arabic history because of the encounter with Jewish settlers and to present to Western readers a more broadly representative Palestinian position than they usually obtain from Western sources. Said is presently Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, and chair of the board of trustees of the Institute of Arab Studies. He is a member of the Palestinian National Council as well as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. (Bowker Author Biography) Edward W. Said is University Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of nineteen books, including "Orientalism" (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), "Culture & Imperialism", "The End of the Peace Process", & "Out of Place", a memoir. He lives in New York City. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Music at the Limits
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- Reviews
- 1
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- (3.58)
- Languages
- 5 — Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
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