“This book is the crowning achievement of a first-rate scholar, drawing on decades of intensive as well as extensive expertise. The perspective it offers on Western art music is not just exceptionally well informed but also thoroughly original. Scholars in generations to come will find it an invaluable document of how scholars working at the end of the Western canonic paradigm viewed that paradigm.” 

Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University

“A Language of Its Own is not a long moan about the rise and fall of Western music. Ruth Katz is an elegant analyst, not a polemicist. And she is hopeful that our musical tradition can regain its footing, perhaps by recreating the ‘abstracting’ process that allowed Western music, despite its inability to describe what it does, to beguile and fascinate us for so long.”

Wall Street Journal

“This is a history of Western art music ‘in its entirety,’ a process of historical development, in the old-fashioned Hegelian sense, that ‘culminated in what is generally known as “absolute music.”’ The result is a Fukuyamalike reading of the end of a musical history that was completed by the composition of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century works.”

Times Literary Supplement

“Intertwining musicology with cultural and intellectual history, Ruth Katz produces an almost unnervingly brilliant philosophical history of sound. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber, Katz is able to draw upon semiotics—as Weber was not—to understand musical rationalization. Reconstructing Western music as a signifying system without concrete referent, A Language of Its Own inserts music analysis into contemporary debates about culture and social theory.”

Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University