Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media » (New Edition)

Michael Long is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

"A virtuoso performance.
In this work of vastly erudite cultural imagination, Long both dazzles and illuminates. He has fashioned, in elegant prose, a thrilling mosaic of critical interpretation, one that is assured a central place on the leading edge of music scholarship."—Albin Zak, author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks Making Records

Introduction 1

Pt. 1 Registering the Classic

1 The Expressive Vernacular 11

2 Making Overtures 44

3 Yiddishkeit and the Musical Ethics of Cinema 73

Pt. 2 Envisioning the Classic

4 Hearing Monsters 109

5 The Fantastic, the Picturesque, and the Dimensions of Nostalgia 121

6 Listening in Dark Places 157

7 Concertos, Symphonies, Rhapsodies (and an Opera) 196

Conclusion: Sitting Down with Mnemosyne 233

Notes 241

Selected Bibliography 287

Index 299