Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past

Exhaustively researched and documented . . . [this book] considers such concepts as intention, ambiguity, mimesis, chance, and necessity -- each with its own chapter -- in the light of modernist concepts, and with a critique as to whether that is adequate to understand Mozart's works, divorced from the magic and genius that many music lovers have long associated with him. A detailed and impressive set of arguments, concluding that the limits of modernist aesthetics are inadequate to understanding 'a Mozartean beauty -- where the familiar, the superabundant, and the uncanny meet.' AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE

WINNER of the 2019 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award from the Mozart Society of America