Browse

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes. This book unmasks such prismatic moments in iconic music from the Enlightenment, from the “chromatic” moment—the single tone that disturbs the thrust of a diatonic musical discourse—and its deployment in seminal instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; on to the poetic moment, taking the odes of Klopstock, in their finely wrought prosody, as a challenge to the problem of strophic song; and finally to the grand stage of opera, to the intense moment of recognition in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino's daring moment of escape in Mozart's Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail provoke a reflection on the tragic aspect of Mozart's operatic women. Throughout, other players from literature and the arts—Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them—enrich the landscape of this bold journey through the Enlightenment imagination.

This book weaves three inquiries into an argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in democratic cultures. The term “civic life” refers here to the interaction of citizens rather than to practices of government. The primary inquiry explores what democracy requires of individuals, proceeding through two other inquiries: one into jazz music as a model for democratic interaction, and the other into Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical conception of art as experiential and potentially transformative. Jazz is often described as democratic. Kenneth Burke’s quite American rhetorical and aesthetic theory explains how that is so. For Burke, rhetoric prompts a sense of shared identity, a sense that follows from an experience that is like being taken through a story of a song. Among individuals who are jealous of their freedom, this way of change seems more appropriate, more fitting, than argument. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. This is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. The chapters in this book cycle through these inquiries, elaborating and improvising on them on each pass.

Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music’s ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music’s ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music’s ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music’s stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.

Over the past two centuries Western culture has valorized a particular kind of “good” music—highly serious, magnificently unified, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly original—and has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals. These standards encompass ethical assumptions about the functions of music, concepts of authorship and creativity, and relationships among aspects of the music itself. This book explores these traditional models for valuing music. By engaging with examples such as Handel oratorios, Beethoven and Mahler symphonies, jazz improvisations, the Beatles, progressive rock, and Bruce Springsteen, Good Music argues that metaphors of perfection do justice neither to the perceived strengths nor the assumed weaknesses of the music. Instead, an alternative, transformed model of appreciation is proposed where abstract notions of virtue need not dictate our understanding. Good music can, with pride, be playful rather than serious, diverse rather than unified, engaging to both body and mind, in dialogue with manifold styles and genres, and collaborative to the core. We can widen the scope of what music we value and reconsider the conventional rituals surrounding it, while retaining the joys of making music, listening closely, and caring passionately.

This book is about the changing audiovisual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and its significance for the emergence of musical romanticism. The period from Haydn’s early career to Beethoven’s maturity – roughly 1760 to 1810 – witnessed the cultural diffusion of visual technologies such as magnifying instruments, peepshows, shadow-plays and magic lanterns. From their initial homes in fairgrounds, laboratories and popular scientific literature, these devices moved into domestic spaces, public spectacles and the basic vocabulary of a wide range of discourses, including the language used to discuss music. This book trace the processes of dissemination and reception by which these devices facilitated changes in musical perception. Through relations that include analogy, substitution and accompaniment, the conjunctions of visual technologies and music helped cultivate new modes of listening. They also promoted notions of extending the senses and mastering invisible forces as alternative frameworks to mimesis and expression for making sense of music. By showing that musical romanticism embedded aspects of audiovisual culture, this book addresses one of the grand narratives of music history: that by aligning music purely with the ear and purging its material dimensions, romanticism spurred the development of a culture of serious music. Instead, this book shows how pivotal texts of musical romanticism evidence the entwinements of sight and sound, looking and listening, from which music gained status as the most metaphysical and otherworldly of the arts.

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. This book investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience. Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, it showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides.

Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies by blending the study of musical works with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of music and aesthetics that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share. In its discussion of organicism, formalism, critical plant studies, biosemiotics, and systems theory, the book puts canonical publications by figures such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Eduard Hanslick in conversation with more recent thinkers including Elizabeth Grosz, Michael Marder, Donna Haraway, and Eduardo Kohn. The piano music of Robert Schumann occupies a special place in the book, which features interpretations and analyses of the Arabesque, op. 18, Blumenstück, op. 19, and Waldszenen, op. 82.

Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World gathers together essays from scholars in music, philosophy and sound studies, bringing them into dialogue and addressing a substantial lacuna at the intersection of sound and affect in each of these discourses. Countless objects and experiences attest to a linkage of sound and affect, in music and beyond. In the voice as it speaks, stutters, rustles, chokes, cries, or projects an accent; in music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; in our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made; and in the many modalities of listening that respond to our sonic worlds, the sounds we make and hear can seem to externalize, reflect, recall, or catalyze affective states. These many linkages of sound and affect are far from stable or autonomous. Race, class, and gender, social, cultural, and political experience, and diverse forms of historical change can all condition the relays and relations of sound and affect. If we live in a “tower of sound,” following Leonard Cohen, this tower is sometimes a battlement and sometimes a beacon, every bit as contentious and contradictory as the world in which it takes shape. The essays of Sound and Affect create a space in which music, philosophy and sound studies think the affective dimensions of sound. The collection includes essays by James Currie, Ryan Dohoney, Christopher Haworth, Don Ihde, Robin James, Adam Knowles, Tomás McAuley, Eduardo Mendieta, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, André de Oliveira Redwood, Martin Scherzinger, Lorenzo Simpson, Gary Tomlinson, Daniel Villegas Vélez, Emily Wilbourne, and Jessica Wiskus.

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—the phenomenological style, which sought a renewed contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, figures in this milieu argued for an understanding and description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world, where music acquires meaning when the act of listening is understood to be constitutively shared with others. Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a post-World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war—actual or imminent—a younger cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of speculative thought and imagination. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which are offered in English translation for the first time, An Unnatural Attitude considers the historically situated question: what are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?

This volume looks at the creative work of the great avant-gardist John Cage from an exciting interdisciplinary perspective, exploring his activities as a composer, performer, thinker, and artist. The chapters in this collection grew out of a pivotal gathering during which a spectrum of participants including composers, music scholars, and visual artists, literary critics, poets, and filmmakers convened to examine Cage's extraordinary artistic legacy. Beginning an introductory chapter on the reception of Cage's music, the volume addresses topics ranging from Cage's reluctance to discuss his homosexuality, to his work as a performer and musician, and his forward-looking, provocative experimentation with electronic and other media. Several of the chapters draw upon previously unseen sketches and other source materials. Also included are transcripts of lively panel discussions among some of Cage's former colleagues.