Cultivating Music : The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848 by David Gramit

“By defining the notion of music as high art in terms of power and authority, David Gramit has removed rigid, canonic assumptions from the study of musical culture of the early nineteenth century, and he has made a major contribution to that subject. The book should be widely read.”–William Weber, author of “Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848 “An important, rich, and multifaceted examination of the growth of bourgeois musical culture. Gramit founds his work on the idea that ‘music’ is the entire cultural, philosophical, political, social, and economic nexus of practices involved in producing, reproducing, and using the notes ‘themselves.’ The book paints a fascinating picture of the particular resonance of music in early nineteenth century German culture; but Gramit also shows us the origins of many ideas that determine classical music practices today.”–Mary Hunter, author of “The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna