Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory

by Moore, Andrea Zarafshon
ISBN: 9781531508692
Availability:
null
New - Trade Paperback - 9781531508692

Available Offers


Pickup at {0} Out of stock at {0} Check other stores
FREE
Ship to Me
$3.99

Overview

An innovative and much-needed critical work on music and memorialization in relation to AIDS, 9/11, and anti-Black violence in America

Music has long served as a powerful medium for communal mourning and remembrance in times of crisis. Audible Loss examines musical responses to three major crises in U.S. society at the turn of the twenty-first century: the AIDS epidemic, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing conditions of anti-Black violence.

Analyzing a range of works written to commemorate these losses, Andrea Zarafshon Moore explores how contemporary classical music (aka "new music") frames and narrates these crises, gives voice to grief, imagines other possibilities, and makes loss audible. These crises are read alongside one another to reveal the ways they are mutually imbricated, while also recognizing the sheer commemorative dominance of 9/11 in this century. Attending to broader debates and discourses through which commemoration is always filtered, and the ways interpretive consensus has been sought and articulated in both musical and other memorial forms, Moore probes the conventional claims of commemoration, particularly those for the necessity of remembrance to "healing" and the prevention of future crises.

Audible Loss concludes by reflecting on the limits of existing commemorative forms and the possibility, even necessity, of new ones. Taking the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study, it proposes that while memorials of all kinds may provide outlets for collective remembrance and even mourning, their power to forge a sense of collectivity is diminished as public discourse grows more fragmented. Deeply informed yet highly approachable, Audible Loss is a major contribution to the fields of music and memory studies, essential reading for anyone interested in memory culture in the United States today.

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Moore, Andrea Zarafshon
  • ISBN: 9781531508692
  • Condition: New
  • Number Of Pages: 256
  • Publication Year: 2025
Language: English