Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media
Beautiful Monsters explores the ways in which "classical" music made its way into late twentieth-century American mainstream culture—in pop songs, movie scores, and print media. Beginning in the 1960s, Michael Long's entertaining and illuminating book surveys a complex cultural field and draws connections between "classical music" (as the phrase is understood in the United States) and selected "monster hits" of popular music. Addressing such wide-ranging subjects as surf music, Yiddish...
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"A virtuoso performance. In this work of vastly erudite cultural imagination, Long both dazzles and illuminates. He has fashioned, in elegant prose, a thrilling mosaic of critical interpretation, one that is assured a central place on the leading edge of music scholarship."—Albin Zak, author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks Making Records
Introduction 1Pt. 1 Registering the Classic1 The Expressive Vernacular 112 Making Overtures 443 Yiddishkeit and the Musical Ethics of Cinema 73Pt. 2 Envisioning the Classic4 Hearing Monsters 1095 The Fantastic, the Picturesque, and the Dimensions of Nostalgia 1216 Listening in Dark Places 1577 Concertos, Symphonies, Rhapsodies (and an Opera) 196Conclusion: Sitting Down with Mnemosyne 233Notes 241Selected Bibliography 287Index 299
