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Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media Volume 10
Contributor(s): Long, Michael (Author)

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 ISBN: 0520257200     ISBN-13: 9780520257207
Publisher: University of California Press
OUR PRICE: $36.70  

Binding Type: Paperback - See All Available Formats & Editions
Published: October 2008
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Annotation: "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 T"he Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks Making Records"

Click for more in this series: California Studies in 20th-Century Music
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Music | Genres & Styles - Pop Vocal
- Performing Arts | Film - General
Dewey: 781.68
LCCN: 2007051009
Series: California Studies in 20th-Century Music
Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6" W x 8.9" L (0.95 lbs) 328 pages
Features: Bibliography, Index, Table of Contents
Review Citations: Chronicle of Higher Education 10/10/2008 pg. 21
Choice 02/01/2009
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Beautiful Monsters explores the ways in which "classical" music made its way into late twentieth-century American mainstream culture-in pop songs, movie scores, and print media. Beginning in the 1960s, Michael Long's entertaining and illuminating book surveys a complex cultural field and draws connections between "classical music" (as the phrase is understood in the United States) and selected "monster hits" of popular music. Addressing such wide-ranging subjects as surf music, Yiddish theater, Hollywood film scores, Freddie Mercury, Alfred Hitchcock, psychedelia, rap, disco, and video games, Long proposes a holistic musicology in which disparate musical elements might be brought together in dynamic and humane conversation. Beautiful Monsters brilliantly considers the ways in which critical commonplaces like nostalgia, sentiment, triviality, and excess might be applied with greater nuance to musical media and media reception. It takes into account twentieth-century media's capacity to suggest visual and acoustical depth and the redemptive possibilities that lie beyond the surface elements of filmic narrative or musical style, showing us what a truly global view of late twentieth-century music in its manifold cultural and social contexts might be like.
 
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