Elfin Music

An exploration of fantastic soundworlds in nineteenth-century France, providing a fresh aesthetic and compositional context for Berlioz and others.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1888 Edition.

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Offering a new perspective on two major authors, Minear explores Shakespeare's and Milton's fascination with the idea of language infiltrated by music and reproducing not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects on minds and memories. She reveals that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics.