Philosophy of New Music

Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965692
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
An indispensable key to Adorno’s influential oeuvre—now in paperback In 1949, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosopher’s return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre.

The Philosophy of Modern Song

Author: Bob Dylan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451648723
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Book Description
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence. In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.

Philosophy of Modern Music

Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826414908
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
A landmark work from the founder of the Frankfurt School. A key work in the study of Adorno, of interest to students and general readers alike.

Beethoven

Author: Theodor W. Adorno
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694292
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Beethoven is a classic study of the composer's music, written by one of the most important thinkers of our time. Throughout his life, Adorno wrote extensive notes, essay fragments and aides-memoires on the subject of Beethoven's music. This book brings together all of Beethoven's music in relation to the society in which he lived. Adorno identifies three periods in Beethoven's work, arguing that the thematic unity of the first and second periods begins to break down in the third. Adorno follows this progressive disintegration of organic unity in the classical music of Beethoven and his contemporaries, linking it with the rationality and monopolistic nature of modern society. Beethoven will be welcomed by students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines - philosophy, sociology, music and history - and by anyone interested in the life of the composer.

Music, Philosophy, and Modernity

Author: Andrew Bowie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521107822
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
Modern philosophers generally assume that music is a problem to which philosophy ought to offer an answer. Andrew Bowie's Music, Philosophy, and Modernity suggests, in contrast, that music might offer ways of responding to some central questions in modern philosophy. Bowie looks at key philosophical approaches to music ranging from Kant, through the German Romantics and Wagner, to Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Adorno. He uses music to re-examine many ideas about language, subjectivity, metaphysics, truth and ethics, and he suggests that music can show how the predominant images of language, communication, and meaning in contemporary philosophy may be lacking in essential ways. His book will be of interest to philosophers, musicologists, and all who are interested in the relation between music and philosophy.

Philosophy, Music and Emotion

Author: Madell Geoffrey Madell
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474470629
Category : Emotions in music
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Philosophy, Music and Emotion explores two issues which have been intensively debated in contemporary philosophy: the nature of music's power to express emotion, and the nature of emotion itself. It shows how closely the two topics are related and provides a radically new account of what it means to say that music 'expresses emotion'. Geoffrey Madell maintains that most current accounts of musical expressiveness are fundamentally misguided. He attributes this fact to the influence of a famous argument of the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, and also to the dominant 'cognitivist' approach to the nature of emotion, which sees the essence of emotion to be the entertaining of evaluative judgements and beliefs of a certain sort, an account very much in accord with Hanslick's position. Such an approach results either in the unpersuasive view that musical expressiveness is somehow akin to human expressive gesture, or in the view that music arouses feelings which have no specific object and, unavoidably, no necessary connection with the music.The book argues that the 'cognitivist' account of the nature of emotion is quite false and that it needs to be replaced with a conception of emotions as states of feeling towards - states of intentional feeling - whose objects are often evaluatively characterised states of affairs; however, in the context of the emotions that are aroused by music these objects are always musical events or states. Central to this bold analysis of emotion is a new account of two closely connected mental states, those of desire and of pleasure, and of what role these states have in human motivation and value.

Philosophy of Music

Author: Riccardo Martinelli
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110627418
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
Ranging from Antiquity to contemporary analytic philosophy, it provides a concise but thorough analysis of the arguments developed by some of the most outstanding philosophers of all times. Besides the aesthetics of music proper, the volume touches upon metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, psychology, anthropology, and scientific developments that have influenced the philosophical explanations of music. Starting from the very origins of philosophy in Western thought (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle) the book talks about what music is according to Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, the Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Susanne Langer, Bloch, Adorno, and many others. Recent developments within the analytic tradition are illustrated with particular attention to the ontology of the musical artwork and to the problem of music and emotions. A fascinating idea which recurs throughout the book is that philosophers allow for a sort of a secret kinship between music and philosophy, as means to reveal complementary aspects of truth.

Themes in the Philosophy of Music

Author: Stephen Davies
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191529141
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Representing Stephen Davies's best shorter writings, these essays outline developments within the philosophy of music over the last two decades, and summarize the state of play at the beginning of a new century. Including two new and previously unpublished pieces, they address both perennial questions and contemporary controversies, such as that over the 'authentic performance' movement, and the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of musical works. Rather than attempting to reduce musical works to a single type, Davies recognizes a great variety of kinds, and a complementary range of possibilities for their rendition. Among the questions that Davies considers are these: How can expressiveness be in a musical work when music experiences nothing? Is music a language of the emotions? How do recorded pop songs and purely electronic pieces differ from works created for live performance? Is John Cage's silent piece, 4'33", music? To what extent is the performer free to create her own interpretation and to what extent is she constrained by the composer's score? Is training in musical technicalities a prerequisite for a full appreciation of musical works and performances? Is an awareness of the socio-historical setting in which a work is created relevant to its appreciation? How does the value of individual musical works go beyond the worth of an interest in music in general? Stimulating and insightful both as individual discussions and as a coherent argument, these essays will be greatly enjoyed by philosophers, aestheticians, art theorists, and musicologists.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music

Author: Theodore Gracyk
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136821880
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers and debates in philosophy and music. Essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, music and musicology.

Music Matters

Author: David James Elliott
Publisher: New York ; Toronto : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195091717
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
The author constructs a new concept of music education, one designed to stimulate, guide, and support the efforts of pre-service and practicing music teachers as they tackle the many theoretical and practical issues involved in music education. He provides rigorous reflections on the "why, what, and how" of music teaching and learning that serve as catalysts for critical thinking and individual-philosophy building.