Description
Trade Review"What a delight! Adrian Daub has written the cultural history of a long-neglected and much-maligned medium of musical performance that at one time was cultivated in just about every bourgeois household. If four-hand piano playing regains renewed interest in our own age of mechanical reproduction, we will have Adrian Daub partly to thank." --Thomas Christensen, Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago "Adrian Daub is a peerless and stimulating exegete of the 'four-handed monster': he brilliantly and meticulously excavates the cultural, social, and aesthetic traces of a vital nineteenth-century musical practice." --Jeffrey Kallberg, Associate Dean for Arts & Letters and Professor of Music History, University of Pennsylvania
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ; Introduction ; Chapter 1: The Sonic Hearth and the "Piano Plague" ; Chapter 2: Four-Hand Piano Playing between Parlor Music and the Culture Industry ; Chapter 3: "At Best an Intruder, at Worst a Voyeur": Four-Hand Piano Playing and the Family Unit ; Chapter 4: Four-Handed Monsters ; Chapter 5: The Semantics of the Hand ; Chapter 6: Fordist Chords ; Chapter 7: Musical Platonism: Four-Hand Playing Among the Philosophers ; Chapter 8: Kakanian Variations-Four Hands and the Passing of the Nineteenth Century ; Index