The Musical Representation
The Musical Representation

Author: Charles O. Nussbaum

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0262140969

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How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.

Musical Ontology
Musical Ontology

Author: Lisa Giombini

Publisher: Aesthetics

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788869771064

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What is musical ontology? Why should we as philosophers address it, if ever? These questions constitute the Ariadne's thread running throughout this whole work. The number of papers, volumes and essays that have recently been dedicated to the topic of art and musical ontology is so vast that trying to get a grip on the debate seems like trying to find one's bearings without a compass. This book is a guide to help hapless readers find their way through this philosophical jungle. It is constructed on three levels: the presentation of the debate on musical ontology; a meta-ontological inquiry; and a sort of meta-meta-ontological overview, in which both the ontological and the meta-ontological are examined. It does not contain any apology for musical ontology, nor any attempt to definitively get it off the hook The approach is aporetic, in the spirit of an open investigation in which more questions than answers are posited. But this is the whole point. If this study manages to provide the readers with the necessary theoretical tools to answer these questions for themselves, it could be considered a success. "Whether you are philosophers, musicians or music a cionados, whether you are interested in the analysis, the criticism, the editing, the interpretation of music, or the pursuit of speci c musicological problems, ontology may teach you the kind of issues and considerations to take into account when listening to music. And even if at the end of the book the ontology of art is still not become your cup of tea, I bet the next time you happen upon a performance of My Favorite Things you will dwell for a moment on the puzzles that the sound of music brings about."

Musical ontology
Musical ontology

Author: Lisa Giombini

Publisher: Mimesis

Published: 2018-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 8869771539

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What is musical ontology? Why should we as philosophers address it, if ever? These questions constitute the Ariadne’s thread running throughout this whole work. The number of papers, volumes and essays that have recently been dedicated to the topic of art and musical ontology is so vast that trying to get a grip on the debate seems like trying to find ones bearings without a compass. This book is a guide to help hapless readers find their way through this philosophical jungle. It is constructed on three levels: the presentation of the debate on musical ontology, a meta-ontological inquiry and a sort of meta-meta-ontological overview, in which both the ontological and the meta-ontological are examined. It does not contain any apology for musical ontology, nor any attempt to definitively get it off the hook. The approach is aporetic, in the spirit of an open investigation in which more questions than answers are posited. But this is the whole point. If this study manages to provide the readers with the necessary theoretical tools to answer these questions for themselves, it could be considered a success.

An Analytical Study of the “Musical Ontology” of Six Musical Masterpieces
An Analytical Study of the “Musical Ontology” of Six Musical Masterpieces

Author: Junxiang Liu

Publisher: Scientific Research Publishing, Inc. USA

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 1649977301

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In this book, six representative works by musicians from major periods of Western music history, including Classical and Romanticism, are selected for study and interpretation in the form of “musical ontology”, with the aim of refining and exploring their compositional concepts and techniques, In this way the aesthetic characteristics and artistic values of the works are recognised and understood, summarised and outlined. The six works are: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B Minor “Pathétique”, Liszt’s Symphonic Poem No.3 Les Préludes, and Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor.

All About Music
All About Music

Author: Guerino Mazzola

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-23

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 3319473344

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This book explains music’s comprehensive ontology, its way of existence and processing, as specified in its compact characterization: music embodies meaningful communication and mediates physically between its emotional and mental layers. The book unfolds in a basic discourse in everyday language that is accessible to everybody who wants to understand what this topic is about. Musical ontology is delayed in its fundamental dimensions: its realities, its meaningful communication, and its embodied utterance from musical creators to an interested audience. The authors' approach is applicable to every musical genre and is scientific, the book is suitable for non-musicians and non-scientists alike.

Ferruccio Busoni and the Ontology of the Musical Work
Ferruccio Busoni and the Ontology of the Musical Work

Author: Erinn Elizabeth Knyt

Publisher: Stanford University

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 641

ISBN-13:

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Ferruccio Busoni's conception of the musical work derives from his multiple roles as performer, aesthetician, editor, composer, arranger, and intellectual. Drawing on unpublished scores, manuscripts, sketches and documents from the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, concert programs from a private collection in Berkeley, acoustic recordings, information about Busoni's intellectual interests gleaned from an auction catalogue featuring the contents of his extensive library, and the published aesthetic writings, letters, and compositions, the present study offers the first comprehensive account of Busoni's work concept. By establishing connections between his ideas and his musical practice, it explores and clarifies the reasoning behind his idiosyncratic compositional style, a style characterized by a blurring of boundaries between original and borrowed material. Polystylistic mixtures of the old and new and a distinctive performance style, in which Busoni creatively altered and embellished existing texts, exemplify his practice in an age in thrall to Werktreue, when originality of idea was prized above all else.

Conceptualizing Music
Conceptualizing Music

Author: Lawrence M. Zbikowski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2002-11-14

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 019803217X

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This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.

An Ontology of Multiple Artworks
An Ontology of Multiple Artworks

Author: David Davies

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-02-21

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0192665235

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Multiple artworks are works that can have multiple 'instances' which can play a particular kind of role in the appreciation of those works: for example, there can be multiple copies of a novel, or multiple performances of a musical work. An Ontology of Multiple Artworks is the first book-length critical analytic treatment of the metaphysical issues relating to 'multiple' artworks for over three decades. David Davies takes various considerations to which authors have appealed in arguing for ontological understandings of works in particular multiple art-forms as putative explananda, arguing that an adequate ontology of multiple artworks should be reflectively accountable to these. After clarifying what 'multiplicity' in the arts amounts to, Davies critically assesses the 'Platonist' idea that multiple artworks must be abstract or generic entities of some sort ('types') that exist independently of our creative and appreciative practices. The evolution of this idea is traced, and its ability to deal with the different explananda in play in the literature is gauged. The methodological constraints that should govern this kind of inquiry are also assessed. On the basis of these investigations, it is concluded that Platonism about multiple artworks is seriously compromised. Different non-Platonist options are then considered, and it is argued that the account that best explains the weighted explananda is the 'Wollheimian type' theory, according to which multiple artworks are performances essentially embedded in artistic practices. Finally, sceptical challenges to the very idea that there are such things as multiple artworks are considered.

Musical Understandings
Musical Understandings

Author: Stephen Davies

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2011-08-25

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0199608776

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Musical Understandings presents an engaging collection of essays by Stephen Davies on the philosophy of music. He explores a range of topics, including how music expresses emotion, modes of perception, and musical profundity. The volume includes original material, newly revised articles, and work published in English for the first time.

The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy
The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

Author: Tom?s McAuley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-12-04

Total Pages: 1151

ISBN-13: 0197546269

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Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, or an inescapably embodied human practice, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. In turn, musicians of all stripes have called on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement, and scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into music and into the worlds that sustain it. In this Handbook, contributors build on this legacy to conceptualize the rich interactions of Western music and philosophy as a series of meeting points between two vital spheres of human activity. They draw together key debates at the intersection of music studies and philosophy, offering a field-defining overview while also forging new paths. Chapters cover a wide range of musics and philosophies, including concert, popular, jazz, and electronic musics, and both analytic and continental philosophy.