From Handel to Hendrix

In his new book, Michael Chanan examines the composer as a public figure in the light of Habermas's study of the transformation of the public sphere. Taking his cue from the German philosopher's remarks about the bourgeois concert audience, the emergence of criticism and the development of autonomous music, Chanan examines the fate of the composer through successive incarnations, from Handel, Bach and Rousseau in the eighteenth century to contrasting examples such as Kurt Weill and Duke Ellington, or John Cage and Pierre Boulez, in the twentieth. Calling on recent work in feminist and gay musicology, he investigates themes such as subjectivity and identity in Schubert and Chopin alongside questions of the political economy of music and the composer's progressive marginalization from the centre of musical life. The book continues Chanan's rethink of the relation between music and society pursued in two previous studies published by Verso, Musica Practica and Repeated Takes.