Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature

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In his brilliant new book, Richard Leppert examines the nexus of sound recording, opera, and film in the emergence of twentieth-century modernity and its subjectivities. Whether focusing on Puccini's La fanciulla del West or the films of Terrence Malick, he finds unexpected tensions between the aspirations, pleasures, and traumas of the last hundred years. Only someone equally versed in music, cinema, and cultural theory could have produced such a feast."—Susan McClary, 1995 MacArthur Fellow, author of Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music "Leppert traces modernity’s attempts to recover or reimagine a redemptive Nature in a series of works that span the twentieth century. Boldly confronting their modes of production and reproduction as exemplifying a Technology that seems to oppose the natural, and also straddling the ‘great divide’ between high and mass cultural forms, his study marries taut critical theory with generous celebration of the music, operas, and films with which it deals. It brilliantly manages to unite ecological, philosophical, and political themes in an interdisciplinary fashion that is profound and provocative."—Peter Franklin, author of Seeing through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores and Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds"Any book by Richard Leppert is a major intellectual event, but this one is especially indispensable at a time when our core conceptions of nature and technology have never been more important or more contested. Aesthetic Technologies writes the modern pre-history of our current condition, with all the breadth of learning and clarity of expression at the command of its author, who is unsurpassed in both. Not since Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone Film Typewriter has there been a book this important on the links between media and subjectivity. And not since, well, ever, has anyone shown how foundational music and the technologies of its delivery have been to the proliferation of those links. The details are fascinating, the argument is compelling. Read this book."—Lawrence Kramer, author of The Thought of Music and Expression and Truth