UC Press Blog

By Lawrence Kramer, author of Music and the Forms of LifeThe concept of life has a long and complicated history, but its modern version can be said to date to the late seventeenth century. The science of the time launched a concerted effort to discover what made living bodies, particularly human

By Lawrence Kramer, author of The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of ListeningSound in recent years has escaped its traditionally subordinate relationship to sight and become the object of widespread interest. Sound Studies is a flourishing field. But much of the work done under this rubric has c

By Lawrence Kramer, author of Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History In his classic study of perception, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the experience of listening to a classical sonata, which he takes to be representative of lis