Audible Signs: Essays from a Musical Ground

Description

Whether it's a song by Brahms or by the Boss, a serenade by Mozart or a ballet by John Harbison, music radiates a diverse spectrum of meaningful signs, hidden in plain hearing. To enjoy the interplay of musical signs, it helps to recognize them in the first place. The various iconographic strategies of Audible Signs-including commentary on graphic works, books, poems, and film-yield new appreciations and critiques of composers of vastly divergent styles and technical materials. Author and composer Michael Alec Rose helps readers decode the signs composers give us in their music-sounds that invoke very particular ideas, images, and cultural contexts-and reveals the extraordinary ingenuity with which certain pieces deploy recognizable figures in a musical landscape. None of this can be done systematically. Each artwork reinvents "the code" and demands a unique set of approaches. But the chapters in this invigorating book spring from the same musical ground, where the only thing that matters is to pay attention to the wonders of great music.

Michael Alec Rose is Associate Professor of Composition at Vanderbilt University, where he has won several awards for teaching excellence. His symphonic, chamber and vocal works have delighted and challenged audiences the world over, and he gives frequent guest lectures on music in the United States and abroad.

"Brilliant, spiritual, funny - at times exasperating - this wonderful book is an irreverent and intimate conversational tour of the physical and spiritual reality of music. Ear-opening, mind-cracking, this is a paean to difficult love, and will remind you of every piece of music that you've really listened to." - Margaret Doody, John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Aristotle Detective and other novels "As a first rate composer in his own right, Rose writes from an artist's highly personal perspective, at times polemical, always enthusiastic in both praise and criticism...Rose sets down the basis for an ongoing argument, one in which the very spirit of our great musical tradition must be examined without fear of debate in order to keep it alive." Dr. Donald Sloan, Chair, Department of Music, Coastal Carolina University