This work looks at the "voices" that speak to us through 19th-century classical music and opera. It proposes interpretive strategies that seek the polyphony and dialogism of music, celebrating musical gestures often marginalized by conventional musical analysis.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This eclectic collection of original essays explores women's musical activities and expressions from the twelfth century to the present

«The time gives it proofe» Paradox in the Late Music of Beethoven presents a fresh approach to the study of musical meaning in the complex works of Beethoven's last decade. Several compositions, including the String Quartets Opp. 132 and 130, are examined in terms of a multidisciplinary critical framework that draws on concepts of paradox derived from the fields of myth and literature. This analysis of musical paradox in the selected works of Beethoven provides an effective means of interpreting the many apparently contradictory aspects of this repertoire, and serves as a useful model for the future analyses of narrative design and expressive structure in nineteenth-century music.

Szymanowski's work exhibits a complex negotiation between a nostalgia founded in Romanticism that seeks utopian redemption and a modernist agony that is characterized by a struggle with the negation of the certainties of faith in unified meaning or to postmodern pleasures in decentred possiblities.