The volume you have in your hand is a sort of rehearsal-piano reduction of a number of multimedia lectures I’ve given in the past few years.

I might argue that there's a hidden unity behind this book's miscellaneous character by pointing to some of the features that bind these essays together. My continuing preoccupations are these:

• 1. How to deal with the problems of articulating the meaning or meanings of music.

• 2. How to deal with the larger question of how music and language interact, whether music is “like” spoken/literary language, whether it transcends language, and whether our musical apperceptions are of a different sort from those we engage in regard to words or visual images.

• 3. How, especially in the world of Lieder, text settings highlight certain areas of meter or theme or ironic undertone and leave others in darkness.

• 4. How a musical composition can behave as a critique of a previous composition: how it can be an homage or an act of affectionate mockery or a full-scale repudiation.

• 5. How music interacts with bodily gesture (and again, how both become “legible”). Sometimes dance seems to spell out words with an alphabet of the whole body; sometimes it refuses to constitute itself as a language.

• 6. How one might rehabilitate certain underappreciated or much-scorned figures, such as Meyerbeer, by showing that the very terms of invective used against them can be seen, from another angle, as an indication of what is exciting in their work.

I mean to show how music history has an aesthetic of its own, and how music history interacts with intellectual history (from Rousseau and the encyclopédistes to Paul de Man). The method of these essays is juxtapositive: by abutting music against literature and painting and by abutting the musics of different centuries, I try to frame a particular work, to isolate what is arresting and important in it.

Some readers are likely to object to my preference for a contrapuntal rather than a linear mode of argument. Almost all of the chapters take detours forward or back in time, sometimes of a few decades, sometimes of centuries.