Reviews for Glam Musik: British Glam Music '70 History

The average rating for Glam Musik: British Glam Music '70 History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-25 00:00:00 Curtis Halsted Listening in Paris is a cultural "history of perception" examining the era 1750-1850 during which time French spectators transformed from a chatty, distracted audience to a quiet and engaged listening public. His analytical framework, which Johnson attributes to idealist philosophy, places the listener at the center of the historical narrative and takes the stance that musical meaning does not reside in the score (or authorial intention) but in the specific moment of reception'a discursively shaped and historically contingent moment. He clarifies this statement by asserting that musical meaning is not completely up for debate, its structure limits the locus of interpretations that can be made and goes on to argue that the act of listening "is a dialectic between aesthetic expectations and musical innovations" (3). In this study, Johnson examines the development of musical styles, perceived musical meanings, general cultural norms and expectations, new forms of theatre architecture and socio-political circumstances to describe and explain this transformation in engagement. Johnson is primarily a historian and the majority of his source base comes from texts (reviews, memoirs, correspondence, etc.) with musical analysis scattered throughout to "locate salient musical features that reinforced, challenged or changed existing aesthetic assumptions" (5). While generally trying to present a gradual and uneven change in listening conventions during this time period, the attention Johnson pays throughout to specific composers and works (as well the overall organization into 5 distinct parts) gives the impression of ruptures in this process'an aspect of his work that he both embraces and attempts to mitigate (as on page 83: "Musical perception does not change monolithically"). Overall, Johnson makes a convincing argument with the material available to him. While he does acknowledge the limitations of his source base, one does wonder how representative the texts he calls upon are for describing the entire listening public. However, it would almost seem unfair to expect Johnson to accurately recreate the experience of all listeners during this time (regardless of class, etc.) because the documentation simply is not there. Despite some potential methodological issues and literalism in his readings, I feel that he has argued his point well considering material constraints. A question that arose for me was how this trajectory might differ in another European nation'would the periodization be similar? Would the points of apparent rupture align? What if we took this history of listening deeper into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Perhaps Johnson's work is most successful in its ability to generate these questions and more.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-06 00:00:00 Raymond Wigger Excellent and above all entertainingly written account of Parisian opera & concert life in the 18th and 19th centuries.