On Counter-Enlightenment, Existential Irony, and Sanctification
This book introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demography in Western art musics and demonstrates their historical and sociological importance. The essays in this book explore the concepts of “existential irony” and “sanctification,” which have been mentioned or discussed by music scholars, historians, and musicologists only either in connection with specific composers’ works (Shostakovich’s, in the case of “existential irony”) or very parenthetically, merely in passing in the biographies of composers of “classical” musics. This groundbreaking work illustrates their generality and sociological sources and correlates in contemporary Western art musics.
Judah Matras is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at Carleton University, Ottawa, and at the University of Haifa. He holds degrees in Statistics (B.Sc.) and in Sociology (M.A. and Ph.D.) from the University of Chicago, and has had Visiting Professor appointments at the University of Chicago; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Washington, Seattle; the Bildungsforschung, Berlin; Harvard University; and Nuffield College, Oxford. Most of his research and publications were devoted to social inequality. stratification, and population studies, but in most recent teaching years he taught courses and seminars in the sociology of music and has presented and published a number of research papers in this field.