Product Description

With her usual combination of erudition, innovation, and spirited prose, Susan McClary reexamines the concept of musical convention in this fast-moving and refreshingly accessible book. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, "Conventional Wisdom" offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues. McClary looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves easily across a broad range of repertoires - the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap.As one of the most influential trailblazers in contemporary musical understanding, McClary once again moves beyond the borders of the 'purely musical' into the larger world of history and society, and beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a musical pluralism. Those who know McClary only as a feminist writer will discover her many other sides, but not at the expense of gender issues, which are smoothly integrated into the general argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling the story of Western music, "Conventional Wisdom" bravely tackles big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1154046 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 219 pages

Review
"McClary's high-spirited optimism, and her sense of being a wide-eyed child determined to ask and go on asking the question 'why?', makes this book as compelling and as disarmingly irresistible as her heartfelt introductory acknowledgement to the campus coffee-house in which much of it was written."--"BBC Music Magazine

Customer Reviews

An excellent, challenging read - a must for music scholars.
From her stable of academic thoroughbreds, 'Music and Society', 'Carmen' and 'Feminine Endings' comes McClary's latest offering on music in context, 'Conventional Wisdom' - a book that is anything but conventional.

Based on a series of five lectures given at Berkeley in 1993, we move from an opening general discussion of musical conventions to a controversial look in Chapter 2 at the blues of the nineteen hundreds, twenties and thirties. A quantum leap.

No musical tradition is to be privileged above any other. Wonderful to read about Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Eric Clapton and Cream! The blues repertory has a lot of superb music which has helped to shape our era, and that's a 'good enough reason to study it.' Can't disagree with that.

Next the 'set of conventions we call tonality' is discussed. We are told that tonality-Western art music from (roughly) the last four centuries based on the major/minor key system and a hierarchy of musical signifiers-is an arbitrary construct, a product of its time and not something to be treated as sacrosanct.

Taking us through periods of music history from the mannered seventeenth century to the dying gasps of the last millenium, McClary daringly juxtaposes Stradella with the Swan Silvertones, Bessie Smith with Scarlatti, and Bach with The Artist formerly known as Prince.

For her there is no such thing as 'pure music'. All music has to be considered in context, including Western art music. Part of this scrutiny includes very detailed musical analyses of seventeen specific examples. Fascinating in themselves, they are a bit hard going at times, and this book could easily have had a wider general appeal had these bits been more tidily packaged and signposted with the words 'non music scholars can skip the next few pages.' And everyone needs to hear these on an accompanying tape or CD to get the full benefit of her arguments - McClary admits this in her preface. Perhaps on the next re-run? Just a few small excerpts of each piece would do the trick, I think!

I particularly enjoyed the slant on music that could only really come from an American musicologist and feminist, the open minded way in which McClary gives as much credence to the validity of Afro-American genres - blues, rock and roll and rap as she does to more highbrow European strains. True, Wagner Beethoven and Bach are discussed, at length, but so too are country blues singer k.d.lang, minimalist Phillip Glass and black gangster rapper Chuck D.

In this huge range of musical offerings, McClary sometimes shocks, sometimes numbs the brain but is never boring. She never takes any received wisdom for granted. She constantly challenges the status quo, disliking dogma and confronting the canon. I was in turns irritated and amused by the chameleon like way her language ranged from expressions like 'Italianate figuration devolving into the torutured pathos of interiority' to 'the sly insinuating grind hangs every which way but loose' (One for Clint Eastwood fans). I got used to it after a while though and had fun writing "gosh" or "wow" in the margins. McClary is as unconventional in her writing styles as she is in her arguments. Sometimes the sonic montage seems a little gratuitous, but I doubt you will find many books that will have such a variety of music discussed in this way. I think Susan McClary can more adequately sum up the essence of her book than I can...

'If I tend to reread the European past in my own Postmodern image, if I frequently write about Bach and Beethoven in the same ways in which I discuss the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and John Zorn, it is not to denigrate the canon, but rather to show the power of music through history as a signifying practice.'

In this book, she certainly does.