Music and the Forms of Life

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Written by an author who has been at the top of his game for more than three decades—and remains there—Music and the Forms of Life moves deftly between the mechanical, the musical, and the human (or, more precisely, modern conceptions of the human). The intricate machinery of this book makes it more satisfying than anything I have read on this topic. Music's vital spark is a constant presence."—J. P. E. Harper-Scott, author of The Event of Music History "In a series of fascinating close readings stretching from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Lawrence Kramer's book explores how music echoes, stimulates, and simulates the operations of organic life. It invites us to rethink the canonic soundworlds of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in terms of pulsation, drive, nervous excitation, and even excretion. And it asks what happens at the dawn of the twentieth century when organic musical processes—and the forms of selfhood they capture—are revealed as artifice. Along the way, Kramer draws in a vibrant cast of characters, from Vaucanson's musical automata and Hoffmann's Sandman to Poe's incorporeal ghouls and Dreyer's vampire. The result is a richly textured look at music's entanglement with the natural and mechanical sciences that leaves us with a striking suggestion (or is it a challenge?): 'Music is disembodied life continually reembodied in whoever hears it fully.'"—Francesca Brittan, author of Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz