Musicology and Dance: Historical and Critical Perspectives

Description

Long treated as peripheral to music history, dance has become prominent within musicological research, as a prime and popular subject for an increasing number of books, articles, conference papers and special symposiums. Despite this growing interest, there remains no thorough-going critical examination of the ways in which musicologists might engage with dance, thinking not only about specific repertoires or genres, but about fundamental commonalities between the two, including embodiment, agency, subjectivity and consciousness. This volume begins to fill this gap. Ten chapters illustrate a range of conceptual, historical and interpretive approaches that advance the interdisciplinary study of music and dance. This methodological eclecticism is a defining feature of the volume, integrating insights from critical theory, film and cultural studies, the visual arts, phenomenology, cultural anthropology and literary criticism into the study of music and dance.

Davinia Caddy writes about the interrelations between music, the visual arts and gesture. She is the author of The Ballets Russes and Beyond (Cambridge, 2012), and is currently working on projects related to contemporary musical culture, archival theory and practice. Maribeth Clark is Associate Professor of Music at New College of Florida. Her articles on theatrical and social dance in mid-nineteenth-century Paris have appeared in the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Musical Quarterly and several edited volumes. She is currently writing a monograph on the cultural history of whistling.

'An engaging, erudite, and brilliantly edited collection of important essays on music and dance. Here the producers and process of art are valued as much as the product. While honoring the embodied knowledge of dancers themselves and respecting the all too human aspects of dance, the authors also, in complementary ways, address the sublime - the beauty beyond our mortal ken.' Simon Morrison, Princeton University, New Jersey 'This refreshing and thoughtful book contributes to the body of research that has been synthesizing dance and music for more than 30 years ... Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' A. E. Handfield, Choice 'Dance has proved an increasingly rich site of musicological study since the 1980s, and a new collected volume edited by Davinia Caddy and Maribeth Clark from Cambridge University Press makes a valuable contribution to that growing body of literature ... Scholars in this interdisciplinary space will welcome a work brimming with the diversity of conceptual, historical, and interpretative approaches that this text provides.' Lena Leson, Revue de musicologie