Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject

As a work of music theory, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject represents a unique aesthetic, semiotic, and hermeneutic approach more commonly found in musicology. It takes advantage of every opportunity to challenge music theory's comfortable obsession with closed systems of analysis. . . . Klein is clearly one of today's leading scholars of musical narrative and subjectivity.

It is a consequence of the richness of Michael Klein's Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject that we are able to trope endlessly upon it, to spin out our own arabesques of musical thought. If the contexts that I have presented above help in any way to ensure that this precious book will be widely read and integrated into one's work as a researcher, teacher, and musician, then they will have served their purpose.

Klein (Temple Univ.) uses the theoretical frameworks of recent French critical theory, notably the thought of Jacques Lacan, to build a bridge between poststructural criticism and music. . . Highly recommended.