Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology

Reviews / Votes

Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology is a tour de force. By dint of extraordinarily comprehensive historical research and sophisticated theoretical insights, Matthew Gelbart demonstrates how and why genre mattered deeply in the nineteenth century, even when it seemed absent, challenged, or denied - and why, even today, we cannot escape the shadow of Romantic understandings of musical genre. * Jeffrey Kallberg, author of Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre * 'Why should we care about genre?' The question, posed in the Prologue, is explored in depth over the course of this fascinating, erudite book. The concentration on nineteenth-century music, immediately thought-provoking, yields spectacular results, offering new perspectives on music we may have thought we knew very well indeed. ... a vital contribution to the continuing debates about music and the social world it inhabits. * Roger Parker, Emeritus Professor, King's College London * Defining genre generously and Romanticism unromantically, Gelbart proves two crucial points: that genres never stopped shaping musical experiences, and that Romantic aesthetics still haunt our relations to artworks, media, and one another. Gelbart has read everything. He always finds the perfect musical example, the salient anecdote, the pithy quote. By confronting entrenched ideologies with the reality of what actually happened, he provides a wholly new picture of musical cultures we can't-and shouldn't-stop caring about. * Charles Kronengold, author of Living Genres in Late Modernity: American Music of the Long 1970s * Taking his cue from various literary reflections on the enabling power of genre, Mathew Gelbart revisits one of the fundamental questions about music: how do we classify and describe works, groups of works and parts of works? Moving from Wagner, to Verdi, Brahms, Chopin, and Bizet, Gelbart offers radical new ways of talking about genre and its implications. * Mark Everist, author of Mozart's Ghosts * Matthew Gelbart assimilates a broad range of genre theory and adds his own nuances spurred on by the specifics of the Romantic music that forms the basis of the study. As such, he highlights how genre is one the ties that binds Western art music of the 19th century to contemporary popular music as well as to other types of music. Musical Genre and Romantic Ideology is impeccably researched and a pleasure to read. * David Brackett, Professor of Music History and Musicology, McGill University *