'What I prize most of all in scholarly writing on music is the author's ability to make me hear and understand compositions and concepts I thought I already knew in new ways. Irony is a slippery, many-sided subject, but Michael Cherlin deftly disentangles and then categorizes its numerous manifestations both in language and in music: irony at the hinge of change, irony in contrapuntal juxtaposition, ironies of irruption or interruption, and much more.' Susan Youens, University of Notre Dame, Indiana