Selected Essays. What is responsible for our response to music, and to what is our response responsible? The essays in this outstanding collection explore this question and by finding cultural meaning in music they exemplify the critical turn in musicology. Sixteen essays have been selected, most of them previously published, from the late 1980s to the present day. These are prefaced by an introduction in which Kramer traces the intellectual development of critical musicology and discusses the part these essays have had to play in that movement.