LOVING MUSIC TILL IT HURTS

LOVING MUSIC TILL IT HURTS

Can music feel pain? Do songs possess dignity? Do symphonies have rights? Of course not, you might say. Yet think of how we anthropomorphize music, not least when we believe it has been somehow mistreated. A singer butchered or mangled the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl. An underrehearsed cover band made a mockery of Led Zeppelin's classics. An orchestra didn't quite do justice to Mozart's Requiem. Such lively language upholds music as a sentient companion susceptible to injury and in need of fierce protection.   There's nothing wrong with the human instinct to safeguard beloved music . . . except, perhaps, when this instinct leads us to hurt or neglect fellow human beings in turn: say, by heaping outsized shame upon those who seem to do music wrong; or by rushing to defend a conductor's beautiful recordings while failing to defend the multiple victims who have accused this maestro of sexual assault. Loving Music Till It Hurts is a capacious exploration of how people's head-over-heels attachments to musiccan variously align or conflict with agendas of social justice. How do we respond when loving music and loving people appear to clash? "This subtle yet powerful book on the complex dynamics of love of music and persons is a crucial part of larger forces in our historical moment: the moral and artistic voices that examine and enact A Love Supreme. And Eva Cassidy smiles!" CORNEL WEST, Harvard University "Witty, passionate, provocative, and humane, Cheng's fascinating book--with its soaring, singing voice--digs deep to the roots of what love, music, and the chords they strike together can mean in an ethically alert life." STEPHEN HOUGH, concert pianist "With rare honesty and unconditional compassion, Will Cheng confronts our deeply held commitment to music as a humanizing force. A bravely vulnerable exploration of both the joys and the dangers of loving music." SCOTT BURNHAM, author of Mozart's Grace "Cheng's book made me take stock of my own love for music and for people. And it isn't all pretty! By the end, I was reading and crying with pen in hand, drawing up resolutions for new modes of loving, living, and listening." SHERRIE TUCKER, author of Dance Floor Democracy "Equally relevant to musicians, scholars, and fans, Loving Music Till It Hurts is a consciousness-raising book with razor-sharp analyses of how people justify and defend their musical opinions. A must-read." DANA GOOLEY, Brown University William Cheng is Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. His books include Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019), and Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford, 2019, coedited with Gregory Barz). He serves as a coeditor of University of Michigan Press's "Music & Social Justice" series.