The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poetic book roves freely over music, media, language, philosophy, and science from the ancient world to the present, along the way revealing how life is apprehended through sounds ranging from pandemonium to the faint background hum of the world. This warm meditation on auditory culture uncovers the knowledge and pleasure waiting when we learn that the world is alive with sound.
Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, is an award-winning composer and the author of fifteen previous books including The Thought of Music, winner of the 2017 ASACP Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism.
Bookshelf recommendation by Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, on his blog “The Rest Is Noise”
“A masterpiece.”—Michael Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject
“A more-than-intriguing read . . . will get you thinking about the role of sound within a cosmic context.”—Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians
“A meditation on the ways in which sound permeates life and mediates living.”—Nina Eidsheim, author of The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music
“Every sentence resonates with fresh understanding and aural acuity, gracefully voiced to the accompaniment of a discrete yet immense erudition. This book will change the way you listen to life.”—Axel Englund, author of Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion Onstage
256 pp.6 x 9Illus: 3 b/w illus.
9780520382992$22.95|£20.00Paper
Jun 2021