The cultural and performative turns in social theory have enlivened sociology. For the first time these new developments are fully integrated into new approaches to the sociology of the arts in this important new book. Building on the established research into art worlds, what is interesting for the new sociology of the arts, understood in the broad sense to include popular culture as well the classical focus on music, painting, and literature, is the relationship between art works and meaning, myth, and performance. Also reflected in these rich essays, which range from Beethoven to John Lennon to Chinese avant garde artists, is the lived experience of the artist and its impact on the process of creation and innovation.

This selection of sixteen of Nicholas Cook's essays covers the period from 1987 to 2004 and brings out the development of the author's ideas over these years. In particular the two keywords of the title -Meaning and Performance- represent critical directions that expand to the point that, by the end of the book, they become coextensive: music is seen as social action and meaning as created by that action. Within this overall direction, a wide variety of topics is explored, ranging from Beethoven to Schenker, from Chinese qin music to jazz and rock, from perceptual psychology to sketch studies and analysis of record sleeves. A substantial introduction draws out the links (and differences) between the essays, sometimes critiquing them and always setting them into the developing context of the author's work as a whole.

The cultural and performative turns in social theory have enlivened sociology. For the first time these new developments are fully integrated into new approaches to the sociology of the arts in this important new book. Building on the established research into art worlds, what is interesting for the new sociology of the arts, understood in the broad sense to include popular culture as well the classical focus on music, painting, and literature, is the relationship between art works and meaning, myth, and performance. Also reflected in these rich essays, which range from Beethoven to John Lennon to Chinese avant garde artists, is the lived experience of the artist and its impact on the process of creation and innovation.

This book explores how the immediate experience of musical sound relates to processes of meaning construction and discursive mediation. A unique multi-authored work that both draws on and contributes to current debates in ethnomusicology, musicology, psychology, and cognitive science, it presents a novel and productive view of how cultural practice relates to the experience and meaning of musical performance.

Being an audience participant can be a confusing and contradictory experience. When a performance requires us to do things, we are put in the situation of being both actor and spectator, of being part of the work of art while also being the audience who receives it, and of being both perceiving subject and aesthetic object. This book examines these contradictions – and many others – as they appear by accident and by design in increasingly popular forms of interactive, immersive, and participatory performance in theatre and live art. Borrowing concepts from cognitive philosophy and bringing them into a conversation with critical theory, Gareth White sharply examines meaning as a process that happens to us as we are engaged in the problems and negotiations of a participatory performance. This study will be of great interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, intermedial arts and games studies, and to practising artists.

How simulated experiences—from living history to emergency preparedness drills—create meaning in performance

Kent Greenawalt's From the Bottom Up constitutes a collection of articles and essays written over the last five decades of his career. They cover a wide range of topics, many of which address ties between political and moral philosophy and what the law does and should provide. A broad general theme is that in all these domains, what really is the wisest approach to difficult circumstances often depends on the particular issues involved and their context. Both judges and scholars too often rely on abstract general formulations to provide answers. A notable example in political philosophy was the suggestion of the great and careful scholar, John Rawls, that laws should be based exclusively on public reason. The essays explain that given uncertainty of what people perceive as the line between public reason and their religion convictions, the inability of public reason to resolve some difficulty questions, such as what we owe to higher animals, and the feeling of many that their religious understanding should count, urging exclusive reliance on public reason is not a viable approach. Other essays show similar problems with asserted bases for legal interpretations and the content of provisions such as the First Amendment.