In this book, a continuation of Michael Chanan’s investigation of the relation between music and society, the author examines the composer in the light of Jurgen Habermas’s study of the public sphere. Taking his cue from the German philosopher’s remarks about the bourgeois concert audience, the emergence of criticism and the development of autonomous music, Chanan examines the fate of the composer through successive incarnations, from Handel, Bach and Mozart in the eighteenth century by way of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler and Debussy in the nineteenth, to Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Gershwin, Weill, Ellington, Cage and Boulez in the twentieth.Drawing upon recent work in feminist and gay musicology, the book ranges over themes such as subjectivity and identity in Schubert and Chopin, the ascendancy of the Romantic personality, the lure of the exotic in Milhaud’s work, and the political economy of music.A detailed history of the idea of the composer as a public figure, Chanan’s book charts both the dramatic change in the listening audience and, simultaneously, the composer’s progressive marginalization from the centre of musical life.“It is undoubtedly true, as the music critic Hans Keller used to observe, that more people nowadays hear a single broadcast of a new work by an avant-garde composer than would have heard all Beethoven’s symphonies in his own lifetime. But the effects are not only quantitative; they also include radical alterations in the relationship between the audience and the object of aesthetic consumption, which seriously affect the situation of the composer, whose audience may now be wider and larger, but also becomes ever more fragmented and anonymous.”

Product Description: The Dream the Kicks is a classic account of the prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain. In this new paperback edition, which has been thoroughly revised to take into account recent scholarship of early cinema, Michael Chanan provides a fasciniating account of the rich and hitherto hidden history of the origins of film...read more

Product Description: Musica Practica is a historical investigation into the social practice of Western music which advances an alternative approach to that of established musicology. Citing evidence from Barthes, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Max Weber and Schoenberg, Michael Chanan explores the communal roots of the musical tradition and the effects of notation on creative and performing practice...read more

Product Description: Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema. The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The writings included in this book are mainly history of Cuban cinema and Cuban cultural politics, the first to be written in English, focus not only on the films made but also on Cuba's position in Latin American culture and its role within the international economy of Hollywood...read more