{"product_id":"four-handed-monsters-four-hand-piano-playing-and-nineteenth-century-culture-9780199981779","title":"Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture","description":"In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that could afford not to invest in them.\u003cbr\u003eDuets echoed from the student bedsit to Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical phenomenon, it could cross national, social, and economic boundaries, bringing together poor students with the daughters of the bourgeoisie, \u003cbr\u003ecrowned heads with penniless virtuosi, and the nineteenth century often regarded it with extreme suspicion for that very reason. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFour-hand piano playing was often understood as a socially acceptable way of flirting, a flurry of hands that made touching, often of men and women, not just acceptable but necessary. But it also became something far more serious than that, a central institution of the home, mediating between inside\u003cbr\u003eand outside, family and society, labor and leisure, nature and nurture. And writers, composers, musicians, philosophers, journalists, pamphleteers and painters took note: in the art, literature, and philosophy of the age, four-hand playing emerged as a common motif, something that allowed them to\u003cbr\u003einterrogate the very nature of the self, the family, the community and the state. In the four hands rushing up and down the same keyboard the nineteenth century espied, or thought to espy, an astonishing array of things. \u003cem\u003eFour-Handed Monsters\u003c\/em\u003e tells not only the story of that practice, but also the\u003cbr\u003estory of the astonishing array of things the nineteenth century read into it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Adrian Daub\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press, USA\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/02\/2014\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 256\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.05lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.30h x 6.10w x 0.90d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780199981779\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAdrian Daub\u003c\/strong\u003e is Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University, where he works on the intersection between literature, music and philosophy in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of \u003cem\u003eUncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism\u003c\/em\u003e (2012) and \u003cem\u003eTristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner\u003c\/em\u003e (2013).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThis title is not returnable\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press, USA","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":39937687421043,"sku":"9.7802E+12","price":37.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/9255\/0515\/products\/img_3ea62d41-78c1-4e9e-a68d-c77b4cc164ec.jpg?v=1647995738","url":"https:\/\/bookstorenmore.com\/products\/four-handed-monsters-four-hand-piano-playing-and-nineteenth-century-culture-9780199981779","provider":"Bookstore N More","version":"1.0","type":"link"}