Developing Variations
Style and Ideology in Western Music
Combines into a cohesive statement the author’s pathbreaking critical essays on Western music.
Combines into a cohesive statement the author’s pathbreaking critical essays on Western music.
Rose Subotnik stands out as perhaps the most interesting and provocative person to have written from a nonpositivist, nonvenerative position about music in society, rather than music as autonomous art. Her massive project on post-Kantian philosophy, as embodied in and carried forward by music, is in a class by itself. In her philological and interpretive reading of Adorno, she is, I believe, the major voice.
Edward W. Said, Columbia University
Music, even at its formal level, says Rose Rosengard Subotnik, is to be understood as an embodiment of specific cultural and social values, as defined within the interpreter’s own context. In Developing Variations, Subotnik critically employs the insights of Adorno, Kant, Hegel, and Marx to analyze the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Schoenberg.
Rose Subotnik stands out as perhaps the most interesting and provocative person to have written from a nonpositivist, nonvenerative position about music in society, rather than music as autonomous art. Her massive project on post-Kantian philosophy, as embodied in and carried forward by music, is in a class by itself. In her philological and interpretive reading of Adorno, she is, I believe, the major voice.
Edward W. Said, Columbia University
Rose Subotnik is a challenging, imaginative, and risk-taking scholar, in control of both a difficult body of theoretical texts and the musical tradition she uses to interpret them.
Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
Subotnik is one of the seminal minds of my generation. She tackles more complex, more subtle problems than many musicologists, and the light she sheds on these problems is a brilliant one.
Neal Zalow, Cornell University
Rose Subotnik is one of the leading voices in musical scholarship and criticism alike.
Professor Richard Taruskin, University of California, Berkeley
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