Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery

In Art and the Committed Eye Richard Leppert examines Western European and American art from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. He studies the complex relation between the "look" of images and the variety of social and cultural uses to which they are put and demonstrates that the meaning of any image is significantly determined by its function, which changes over time. In particular, he emphasizes the ways in which visual culture is called on to mediate social differences defined by gender, class, and race. In , Leppert addresses the nature and task of representation, discussing how meaning accrues to images and what role vision and visuality play in the history of modernity. Here he explains imagery's power to attract our gaze by triggering desire and focuses on the long history of the use of representation to enact a deception, whether in painting or advertising. explores art's relation to the material world, to the ways in which images mark our various physical and psychic ties to objects. The author analyzes still life paintings whose subject matter is both extraordinarily diverse and deeply paradoxical―from flower bouquets to grotesque formal arrangements of human body parts. Leppert demonstrates that even in "innocent" still lifes, formal design and technical execution are imbued with cultural conflict and social power. is devoted to the representation of the human body―as subject to obsessive gazing and as an object of display, spectacle, and transgression. The variety of body representation is enormous: pleased or tortured, gorgeous or monstrous, modest or lascivious, powerful or weak, in the bloom of life or under the anatomist's knife, clothed or naked. But it is the sexual body, Leppert shows, that has provided the West with its richest, most complex, contradictory, conflicted, and paradoxical accounts of human identity in relation to social ideals.

Art And The Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions Of Imagery

Arts & Photography

Leppert, Richard

History & Criticism

Routledge

The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity

Richard Leppert boldly examines the social meanings of music as these have been shaped not only by hearing but also by seeing music in performance. His purview is the northern European bourgeoisie, principally in England and the Low Countries, from 1600 to 1900. And his particular interest is the relation of music to the human body. He argues that musical practices, invariably linked to the body, are inseparable from the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality.With the support of 100 illustrations, Leppert addresses music and the production of racism, the hoarding of musical sound in a culture of scarcity, musical consumption and the policing of gender, the domestic piano and misogyny, music and male anxiety, and the social silencing of music. His unexpected yoking of musicology and art history, in particular his original insights into the relationships between music, visual representation, and the history of the body, make exciting reading for scholars, students, and all those interested in society and the arts.

The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body

University of California Press

Richard Leppert boldly examines the social meanings of music as these have been shaped not only by hearing but also by seeing music in performance. His purview is the northern European bourgeoisie, principally in England and the Low Countries, from 1600 to 1900. And his particular interest is the relation of music to the human body. He argues that musical practices, invariably linked to the body, are inseparable from the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality. With the support of 100 illustrations, Leppert addresses music and the production of racism, the hoarding of musical sound in a culture of scarcity, musical consumption and the policing of gender, the domestic piano and misogyny, music and male anxiety, and the social silencing of music. His unexpected yoking of musicology and art history, in particular his original insights into the relationships between music, visual representation, and the history of the body, make exciting reading for scholars, students, and all those interested in society and the arts.

Music

Essays on Music

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and―more than any other subject―music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.

Adorno, Theodor

Gillespie, Susan H.

This groundbreaking collection by the most distinguished musicologists and film scholars in their fields gives long overdue recognition to music as equal to the image in shaping the experience of film. Refuting the familiar idea that music serves as an unnoticed prop for narrative, these essays demonstrate that music is a fully imagined and active power in the worlds of film. Even where films do give it a supporting role―and many do much more―music makes an independent contribution. Drawing on recent advances in musicology and cinema studies, Beyond the Soundtrack interprets the cinematic representation of music with unprecedented richness. The authors cover a broad range of narrative films, from the "silent" era (not so silent) to the present. Once we think beyond the soundtrack, this volume shows, there is no unheard music in cinema.

Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema

Humor & Entertainment

Kramer, Lawrence

Goldmark, Daniel Ira

Movies

Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England

This innovative study examines the place and practice of musical life in eighteenth-century England among the upper classes. Focusing on the home, it shows how domestic music-making was shaped by socio-cultural forces while itself contributing to socio-cultural formation. The evidence examined is extremely broad, but particular attention is given to visual representations of music in paintings, drawings and prints: one hundred illustrations are discussed. The author considers in detail the problematics of imagery itself, analysing both the ideological and the semiotic content of the visual image. Other material analysed includes the music of the period, instruction manuals, tracts on education, courtesy and conduct books, sermons, letters, diaries and memoirs, fictional writing and journalism.

Cambridge University Press

This innovative study examines the place and practice of musical life in eighteenth-century England among the upper classes. Focusing on the home, it shows how domestic music-making was shaped by socio-cultural forces while itself contributing to socio-cultural formation. The evidence examined is extremely broad, but particular attention is given to visual representations of music in paintings, drawings and prints: one hundred illustrations are discussed. The author considers in detail the problematics of imagery itself, analysing both the ideological and the semiotic content of the visual image. Other material analysed includes the music of the period, instruction manuals, tracts on education, courtesy and conduct books, sermons, letters, diaries and memoirs, fictional writing and journalism.

The essays in Sound Judgment span the full career of Richard Leppert, from his earliest to work that appears here for the first time, on subjects drawn from early modernity to the present concerning music both popular and classical, European and North American. Noted for his path-breaking interdisciplinary scholarship on music and visual culture, the collection includes key essays on music's visualization in art practices in virtually all visual media, including film. The fourteen essays comprising this volume demonstrate Leppert's many contributions to critical musicology, particularly in the areas of aesthetics as well as social and intellectual history, all of it grounded in a heterodox body of critical and cultural theory, with the work of Theodor W. Adorno particularly noteworthy. The collection is preceded by an introduction in which Leppert traces his intellectual development, defined in large part by the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s and their aftermath both in the academy and in society at large.

Sound Judgment: Selected Essays (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology Series)

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Books by Leppert, Richard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Leppert, Richard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Art And The Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions Of Imagery

The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity

Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of Imagery

The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body

The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body

Essays on Music

Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema

Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England

Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England

Sound Judgment: Selected Essays (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology Series)