Beyond Fingal's Cave

JAMES PORTER is Professor Emeritus of Music at UCLA and an Honorary Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Sarah Clemmens Waltz:
Offers fresh consideration of the relevance and immediacy of Ossian. The book accomplishes its task admirably. The book covers music from roughly 1770 to the present. Despite this enormous scope, its strength is consistent. Throughout the volume, Porter makes compelling key-related observations. What most impresses me about Porter's book...is how it...make[s] a case for the value of the music he describes.

Valentina Bold:
Authoritative and imaginative. Technical analysis is a huge strength throughout. Beyond Fingal's Cave shows exactly why the impact of Macpherson's Ossian transcends genre, period, nation, and performance styles. This book is a scholarly tour de force, erudite and analytically fearless. It is a splendid addition to the growing body of scholarship on Ossian.

In the musical arena, the [Ossian] poems inspired uncountable compositions in the most varied genres, from opera to piano cycle and from overture to symphony. Porter's descriptions are vivid and well written. His knowledge of the [scholarly] literature goes deep. Porter's study is exemplary in its depth and nuance.

Karen E. McAulay:
To say that the coverage and scope is impressive is almost an understatement. A thoroughly scholarly work, the monograph would find a welcome place in any university or conservatoire collection.

Porter discloses an intricate network of international lines of influence linking Scotland to the musical cultures of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and America. His study brings to light unsung composers, some of whom were women. Porter makes the most persuasive case for Beethoven himself. Most riveting...is his excursus on Mendelssohn. Porter's intimate knowledge of the source material enables him to gauge the relative degree and success of each...blend of the old and the new.

John Michael Cooper, author of Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night:
Beyond Fingal's Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination is destined to become the definitive scholarly handbook on the most influential cultural obsession of Europe and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century. Sweeping in scope and inclusive of vernacular as well as concert repertoires, Porter's book situates the cult of Ossian in a 'landscape of feeling' that arose out of the Burkean dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful, while also interrogating the themes of power and subjugation.

Illustrates, through the continuing popularity of Ossian throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of folk legend on art-culture and popular culture.