A history of Western musical aesthetics

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Theodor W. Adorno

"Quasi una Fantasia contains Adorno's own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music and to the monographs on Berg, Mahler and Wagner. But in the range of its themes and references (from Mozart to Boulez, the minuet to the jitterbug) and in the clarity of its arguments, Quasi una Fantasia stands alone among Adorno's writings on music."--BOOK JACKET. "At the book's core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno's 'dialectical portrait' of Stravinsky, in which he both reconsiders and refines the damning indictment he gave in Philosophy of Modern Music.^ In 'Vers une musique informelle', an enormously influential essay, he plots a course for a music of the future 'which could take up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom'. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, such as Bizet's Carmen and Weber's Der Freischutz, along with an entertainingly caustic 'Natural History of the Theatre' which explores the rituals and hierarchies of the auditorium, from upper circle to foyer."--BOOK JACKET. "'The positive element of kitsch', Adorno remarks, 'lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.' Musical kitsch is the target of several of the shorter pieces: on Gounod's Ave Maria or Tchaikovsky's 'clumsy naivety'; on the 'Penny Serenade' or the transformation of Mozart into chocolate-box rococo.^ Yet even while Adorno demolishes 'commodity music' he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these writings. For Adorno, music and philosophy were inextricably linked: Quasi una Fantasia will enlarge our understanding of both."--BOOK JACKET.

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John Richardson

Here, Richardson navigates key areas of current thought - from music theory to film theory to cultural theory - to explore what it means that experience of music is now cinematic, spatial, and ultimately visual as much as it is auditory.

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Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania

This is a guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers and debates in philosophy and music. Over 50 entries by an international team of contributors are organised into six sections.

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Stjepan G. Meštrović

"As the present century and millennium approach their close, many dramatic endgames have been conceptualized by celebrated intellectuals; for example: the "end of history" (Fukuyama); the "end of culture" (Baudrillard); the "end of communism" (Brzezinski) - the last just in time for the events of 1989. The "end of sociology" might even be proposed by those who deem the field of no practical relevance to contemporary social problems. Mestrovic here cuts against the grain of this nihilistic discourse, by arguing that postmodernism itself is an aspect of culture."--BOOK JACKET. "In setting out to find cultural roots for the many phenomena taken up by postmodernists, he connects the present turmoil with strikingly similar debates at the end of the last century, debates concerning the future of capitalism, communism, feminism, and sociology, among other matters. With ambitious sweep, he relates the work of Emile Durkheim and other earlier figures (such as Henry Adams, Veblen, Jung, Adorno) to contemporary postmodernist discourse. His new book points to an opportunity for sociology to revivify itself by taking the cultural approach of its founders seriously."--BOOK JACKET.