Cherubino's Leap

"Cherubino's Leap springs nimbly across decades, characters, and musical works."-- "Notes"
"Cherubino's Leap is an excellent study by an outstanding musical thinker. It is a work sui generis, an elegant, refined, uncompromising exploration of critical passages in eighteenth-century masterpieces. This is engagement with music at the deepest level."--William Drabkin, editor of Music Analysis
"Cherubino's Leap is full of revelations, as acute and probing an investigation of Enlightenment sensibility as has yet been penned."
-- "Musical Times"
"In this provocative book, Kramer explores musical moments that foster intense engagement by the listener. With a virtuosic range of reference to Enlightenment thinkers, and with heart-catching analyses of words set to music, Cherubino's Leap seeks to understand the 'inner ear' of several important composers by working outward from brief but powerful evocations of meaning in their works. A welcome offering from one of our most profoundly musical scholars."--Elaine Sisman, author of Haydn and the Classical Variation
"A withdrawal from the grandeur of the monograph into a more lyrical world of fragments and essays, strange and productively uneven tapestries, captivating islands of colourful apercus poetically abandoned in seas of a sometimes baffling, threadbare weave. . . . Exquisite . . . . If Cherubino's Leap has such a wealth to offer to our historical understanding of the various ends of the long eighteenth century, it has even more to offer us in terms of the pleasures of the scholarly act itself."
--James R. Currie "Eighteenth-Century Music"