The Thought of Music

The Thought of Music

Author: Lawrence Kramer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0520963628

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What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? The Thought of Music grapples directly with these fundamental questions—questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. In this third volume in a trilogy on musical understanding that includes Interpreting Music and Expression and Truth, Lawrence Kramer seeks answers in both thought about music and thought in music—thinking in tones. He skillfully assesses musical scholarship in the aftermath of critical musicology and musical hermeneutics and in view of more recent concerns with embodiment, affect, and performance. This authoritative and timely work challenges the prevailing conceptions of every topic it addresses: language, context, and culture; pleasure and performance; and, through music, the foundations of understanding in the humanities. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the Joseph Kerman Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Music, Thought, and Feeling

Music, Thought, and Feeling

Author: William Forde Thompson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780199947317

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Examining the intersection of music, psychology, and neuroscience, this text surveys the rapidly growing field of music cognition and explores its most interesting questions. Assuming minimal background in music or psychology, the book begins with an overview of the major theories on how and when music became a widespread aspect of human behavior. Now in its second edition, the text includes enhanced coverage of music therapy, the most recent theory and research, and improved pedagogy, including enhanced definitions of key terms and a reworked organization of topics.


Music as Thought

Music as Thought

Author: Mark Evan Bonds

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1400827396

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Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing. Music as Thought traces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first. Music as Thought is a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.


The Rhythm of Thought

The Rhythm of Thought

Author: Jessica Wiskus

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-03-05

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 022627425X

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Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.


The Thought of Music

The Thought of Music

Author: Lawrence Kramer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0520288807

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"What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? The Thought of Music, completing a trilogy on musical understanding with Interpreting Music and Expression and Truth, grapples directly with these fundamental questions--questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. Lawrence Kramer seeks answers in both thought about music and thought in music--thinking in tones. He skillfully assesses musical scholarship in the aftermath of critical musicology and musical hermeneutics and in view of more recent concerns with embodiment, affect, and performance. This authoritative and timely work challenges the prevailing conceptions of every topic it addresses: language, context, and culture; pleasure and performance; and, through music, the foundations of understanding in the humanities."--Provided by publisher.


Music and Musical Thought in Early India

Music and Musical Thought in Early India

Author: Lewis Rowell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-12-25

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0226730344

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Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal patterns, and genres of Indian music from Vedic times to the thirteenth century, presenting not so much a history as a thematic analysis and interpretation of India's magnificent musical heritage. In Indian culture, music forms an integral part of a broad framework of ideas that includes philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. Rowell works with the known theoretical treatises and the oral tradition in an effort to place the technical details of musical practice in their full cultural context. Many quotations from the original Sanskrit appear here in English translation for the first time, and the necessary technical information is presented in terms accessible to the nonspecialist. These features, combined with Rowell's glossary of Sanskrit terms and extensive bibliography, make Music and Musical Thought in Early India an excellent introduction for the general reader and an indispensable reference for ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, and Indologists.


Expression and Truth

Expression and Truth

Author: Lawrence Kramer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-09-23

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0520953843

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Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world. "Recent years have seen the return of the claim that music’s power resides in its ineffability. In Expression and Truth, Lawrence Kramer presents his most elaborate response to this claim. Drawing on philosophers such as Wittgenstein and on close analyses of nineteenth-century compositions, Kramer demonstrates how music operates as a medium for articulating cultural meanings and that music matters too profoundly to be cordoned off from the kinds of critical readings typically brought to the other arts. A tour-de-force by one of musicology’s most influential thinkers."—Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music.


Interpreting Music

Interpreting Music

Author: Lawrence Kramer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0520267052

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This is a comprehensive essay on musical meaning and performing music meaningfully - 'interpreting music' in both senses of the term. The author argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation in general.


Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought

Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought

Author: Judy Lochhead

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1135717788

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What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions, this ground-breaking collection gathers together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music written primarily by musicologists, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include: the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Górecki, Rochberg, Zorn, and Bolcom, as well as Björk and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race in such films as The Bridges of Madison County, Batman, Bullworth, and He Got Game; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music. Also includes 20 musical examples.


Formalized Music

Formalized Music

Author: Iannis Xenakis

Publisher: Pendragon Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9781576470794

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Pendragon Press is proud to offer this new, revised, and expanded edition of Formalized Music, Iannis Xenakis's landmark book of 1971. In addition to three totally new chapters examining recent breakthroughs in music theory, two original computer programs illustrating the actual realization of newly proposed methods of composition, and an appendix of the very latest developments of stochastic synthesis as an invitation to future exploration, Xenakis offers a very critical self-examination of his theoretical propositions and artistic output of the past thirty-five years. This edition of Formalized Music is an essential tool for understanding the man and the thought processes of one of this century's most important and revolutionary musical figures.