Although many authors have sought to bring together critical studies and music, Currie's book is original in both style and substance. Erudite and loquacious, Currie is a gifted storyteller whose work merits study by advanced scholars. His individual approach to the impasse created by the new musicology establishes a model by which that gulf might be bridged without returning to the status quo.
Choice
Music and the Politics of Negation is an important spur for post-new-musicological discussion of the political in/as music. . . . This book is also a benchmark for meaning-rich, close music analysis.
Notes
[This] book's great strength is the way in which it binds together eighteenth-century and contemporary issues, and in doing so, both probes and perpetuates the prestige of the Viennese classics.94.3 2013
Music & Letters
[J]ames Currie's book . . . organizes a series of close readings of compositions by Mozart and Haydn . . . .67.3 Fall 2014
Jrnl American Musicological Soc JAMS