This book develops
psychoanalytic music criticism in the field of postmodern music
analysis. It offers psychoanalytic listenings of various musics; from a
Romantic symphony to alternative country music, from piano miniatures to
TV-opera. The musical rhetoric of melancholy, uncanny, acoustic
mirroring, alienation and other subjectivity mechanisms are tracked in
the music of Chopin (Nocturne C minor Op. 48), k.d. lang (Constant
Craving, Save me), Nordgren (Alex), Schubert (Der Lindenbaum), Sibelius
(Kyllikki), and Tchaikovsky (Symphony No. 6, Pathétique). The book also
outlines the history and current state of psychoanalytic music analysis
and theorizes music as a site of subjectivity.