David Lidov’s attention-grabbing title pleads for fresh thinking in musicology. It is not intended to advocate a mode of critical discourse that continually inverts fundamental, frequently posed questions, though certain reversals of the expected and familiar are to be found in the pages of what is, basically, a ‘Collected Essays’. Various texts from three decades, some conflated, are brought together, grouped in five parts with new introductions, but usually without extensive engagement with other commentaries on the same materials. We are also encouraged to think of the collection as a kind of parallel to Lidov’s magnum opus, Elements of Semiotics (Toronto, 1999), which is not primarily about music, and which I have not read. The Part titles—‘Structuralist Perspectives’, ‘Semiotic Polemics’, ‘From Gestures to Discourses’, ‘The Messages of Methods’, ‘Resisting Representation’—suggest a network of topics dealing with ‘musical form and signification’, and progressing, overall, from formalism to hermeneutics. Yet the connective tissues of the network are strained by the variety of the elements connected, a consequence of the diverse dates, functions, and locations of the original texts. Perhaps because he is also a composer who takes his creative work seriously enough to devote the last part of the book to it, Lidov wants us to expect the unexpected. It could also be because he is a composer that the book’s argument and originality come most vividly into focus when he is making broadly based judgements about contemporary—or at least post-1900—music, and commenting more generally on ‘fundamental dilemmas of civilization’ (p. 157).
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.