Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture: An Introduction to Music Criticism offers a clear, hands-on guide for emerging music critics that brings together aesthetics, critical theory, and practical music criticism. In an accessible format, readers are introduced to various critical schools and are taught how to connect music to its cultural, social, and political contexts. Over the course of the book, readers develop a vocabulary and framework for criticizing music of all kinds and for various media.

Excerpts from primary sources throughout provide a wide range of writing examples, while chapters address the distinct challenges of describing and interpreting music, and of writing forms such as album reviews and critical essays. The book explores questions at the core of music criticism, such as what constitutes a musical work and what makes a piece of music "authentic," and introduces critical lenses, including feminist and queer criticism, postcolonialism and critical race theory, as well as the analysis of music in consumer culture. Addressing both classical and popular music criticism, Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture is a comprehensive and lively textbook that enables students to uncover, articulate, and analyze what makes music compelling and meaningful.