{"title":"Books by Lawrence Kramer","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780520400849","title":"Experiencing Sound – The Sensation of Being","description":"From the winds of Mars to a baby's first laugh, a prolific philosopher-composer reflects on the profound imperative of sound in everyday life.     Experiencing Sound presents its subject as fundamental to all experience—sensation, perception, and understanding. Lawrence Kramer turns on its head the widespread notion that vision takes pride of place among the senses and demonstrates how paying attention to sound can transform how we make meaning out of experience.      Through a series of brief, lyrical forays, Kramer shows that sound, whether heard or unheard, is the object of a primary need and an essential component in the sensation of being alive and the perception of time. It is something that we may suffer—or be made to suffer—as well as enjoy. Like its predecessor The Hum of the World, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, literature, art, media, and history, from classical antiquity to the present, as it invites us to experience sound anew.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56290439528821,"sku":"9780520400849","price":24.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780520400849_d3358c6e-9bda-4b3b-8a67-8afbacb627c3.jpg?v=1786013687"},{"product_id":"9780520389113","title":"Music and the Forms of Life","description":"Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life.    The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's Goldberg Variations to the genetic code.    The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56290661630325,"sku":"9780520389113","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780520389113_fdeac64f-8c20-43f3-bf2f-54c3f6c18b5d.jpg?v=1786013582"},{"product_id":"experience","title":"Experience","description":"A lyrical, provocative journey into the art, memory, and meaning of experience.   What does it mean to have an experience? When did we begin to believe we could “have\" one at all? In Experience: A History, Lawrence Kramer traces the cultural birth of experience as a singular, life-defining event. Moving lyrically between criticism and memoir, he guides readers from Petrarch and Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson; from Haydn’s luminous Creation to Billie Holiday's searing “Strange Fruit.” Along the way we encounter Niagara Falls and the Galápagos, Parisian department stores and Manhattan nightclubs, and luminaries such as Franz Schubert, Henry and William James, and Benjamin Britten.   As early as the fourteenth century and accelerating after the eighteenth, records of concentrated, unforgettable moments begin to proliferate—until the possibility of having an experience becomes a demand for one. Experience turns into something to seek, curate, even consume. Yet its power lies in its particulars: the convergence of history, art, memory, and self. At once personal and tender, challenging and vulnerable, Experience fuses philosophical argument with intimate recollection. The result is both a sweeping intellectual history and a deeply human reckoning with the experiences that shape and unsettle modern life.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499352957301,"sku":"9780520434387","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-lawrence-kramer.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}