| In the nineteenth century there arose in western bourgeois culture a new and unprecedented interest in the child and childhood, an interest that surfaced in the arts (the belles-lettres, the schone Kunste) and sciences (education, psychology, and sociology). Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience: Nineteenth-Century Musical Theorizations of Childhood locates and interprets specific idealized images of the mother and child in the musical compositions, musical theories, and musical aesthetics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the multiform ways these images have been used to structure educational approaches, to humanize or naturalize musical claims or theoretical constructs, and to represent objectified versions of society's desires and fears. |
