Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich and his music have been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer's middle string quartets. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, also speaks poignantly to the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity.

Author: Sarah Reichardt
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 11/11/2008
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.38d
ISBN: 9780754658849

About the Author
Sarah Reichardt is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Oklahoma.