Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear

Peter Franklin’s The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others set a challenge for musicology: how best to talk and write about the music of modern European culture that fell outside of the modernist mainstream? Thirty years on, Franklin’s students and colleagues return to that challenge and the vibrant intellectual field that has since developed. Moving freely between insights into opera, Volksoper, film, festival, and choral movement, and from the very beginning of the twentieth century up to the 80s, its authors listen with a ‘critical ear’, siting these phenomena within modern cultural practices. This perspective enables them to exercise a disciplinary self-awareness after Franklin’s manner.