Special Book on Carmen…

Susan McClary, George Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge Opera Handbooks Series.

Susan McClary (Ph.D. Harvard, 1976) specializes in the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres (…). McClary is author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (University of California Press, 2000), is co-editor with Richard Leppert of Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Quotes from Susan McClary:

"Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential." from

"Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."

Quote:

"Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music", Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994), ISBN 0415907527