Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
Title | Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning PDF eBook |
Author | Daniel K. L. Chua |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 1999 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
Title | Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning PDF eBook |
Author | Daniel Chua |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 330 |
Release | 1999-11-25 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 1139431358 |
This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'.
Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
Title | Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning PDF eBook |
Author | Daniel K. L. Chua |
Publisher | |
Pages | 328 |
Release | 1999 |
Genre | Absolute music |
ISBN | 9780511325403 |
This book examines the intellectual history of instrumental music, particularly the idea of absolute music. It shows how certain ideas in philosophy, theology and the sciences affect the meaning of instrumental music, and how instrumental music in turn permeates human discourse and helps construct meaning.
Absolute Music
Title | Absolute Music PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Evan Bonds |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 401 |
Release | 2014-05-09 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 019938472X |
What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.
The Idea of Absolute Music
Title | The Idea of Absolute Music PDF eBook |
Author | Carl Dahlhaus |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 187 |
Release | 1991-08-13 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 0226134873 |
This volume examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical backgrounds. In exploring the origins of the idea and its career over two centuries, it brings to light the variety of ways in which it has affected music.
James Joyce and Absolute Music
Title | James Joyce and Absolute Music PDF eBook |
Author | Michelle Witen |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 320 |
Release | 2018-02-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1350014249 |
Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the “Sirens” episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the “pure music” of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.
James MacMillan Studies
Title | James MacMillan Studies PDF eBook |
Author | George Parsons |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 265 |
Release | 2020-08-06 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 1108492533 |
Eleven international scholars analyse key works by Sir James MacMillan, and contextualise his unique musical-theological approach.