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This book explores an idea of music, exemplified by the work of Debussy, in dialogue with a parallel movement in French literary and philosophical thought. Its central thesis is that modern music and philosophy converge on the same set of problems but from opposite directions. Through close readings of selected musical works it argues that Debussy’s rethinking of the relation between sound and grammar anticipates and complements the defining problem of modern philosophy – the gap between language and a sensory relation to the world, between abstract systems of signification and embodied experience. Although its principal focus is the music of Debussy, it ranges widely across French music from Fauré and Ravel to Dutilleux, Boulez, Grisey, Murail, and Saariaho. It ranges similarly through a set of French writers and philosophers, from Mallarmé and Proust to Merleau-Ponty, Jankélévitch, Derrida, Lyotard, and Nancy. Frequent reference is made to the visual arts (Rodin, Monet, Bonnard, Cezanne, Matisse). It explores the idea that this current of French music, running through the long twentieth century from Debussy to the present, makes sense in a manner that affords a different way of knowing the world, foregrounding sound over syntax, and sense over signification.

Beethoven’s music is often associated with freedom. Chua explores the nature of this relationship through an investigation of the philosophical context of Beethoven’s reception and hermeneutic readings of key works. Freedom is arguably the core value of modernity since late eighteenth-century; Beethoven’s music engages with its aspirations and dilemmas, providing a sonic ‘lens’ that enables us to focus on the aesthetic, philosophical, and theological ramifications of its claims of progress and autonomy and the formation of the self and its values. Taking his bearings from Adorno’s fragmentary reflections on Beethoven, Chua charts a journey from the heroic freedom associated with the Eroica Symphony to a freedom of vulnerability that opens itself to ‘otherness’. Chua’s analysis of the music demonstrates how various forms of freedom are embodied in the way time and space are manipulated in Beethoven’s works, providing an experience of a concept that Kant had famously declared inaccessible to sense. Beethoven’s music, then, does not simply mirror freedom; it is a philosophical and poetic engagement with the idea that is as relevant today as it was in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. It offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmology and affirms music theory’s foundational and often normative role within the articulation and development of medieval cosmological models. Offering a counternarrative to the dominant conception of a Weberian “disenchantment,” which regards the harmonious, numerically organized natural world as the hallmark of a premodern worldview that was eventually (for better or worse) discredited and abandoned, this book interrogates the musical, mathematical, philosophical, and discursive strategies employed by ancient and medieval cosmologists in their construction of a harmonious world grounded in material interactions and intermaterial relations. It traces these strategies across the familiar terrain of the Boethian tripartition of music into “instrumental,” “human,” and “cosmic,” and reveals the myriad ways in which this basic tripartition was reinterpreted by Boethius’s twelfth-century readers in the light of other received Platonic texts, especially Plato’s Timaeus. The picture that results from this counternarrative is one in which the recent resurgence of vibrational and relational ontologies resonate, tellingly and productively, with the forgotten history of their medieval antecedents, in the writings of Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Peter Abelard, Bernard Silvestris, and Alain de Lille.

This book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. Critical response to music by composers with disabilities has tracked changing conceptualizations of disability, as divine affliction, divine afflatus, medical pathology, and affirmative identity. The same is true for performers with disabilities: disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts. Music itself may convey narratives about disability, including a familiar narrative of disability heroically and inspirationally overcome. The language that music theorists have traditionally used to describe music is pervaded by metaphors of disability and traditional music theory is essentially a normalizing enterprise. Finally, listeners with disabilities may find that their ways of listening are inflected by their nonnormative embodiment, resulting in various forms of disablist hearing.

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists, and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time. Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.

Grounded in a research-based, conceptual model called Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), the essential premise of Music Learning Today:Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music is that music educators and their students can benefit through use of technology as a tool to support learning in the three musical processes – creating, performing, and responding to music. Insights on how technology can be used to advantage in both traditional and emerging learning environments are provided, and research-based pedagogical approaches that align technologies with specific curricular outcomes are described. Importantly, the book advocates that the decision on whether or not to utilize technology for learning, and the specific technology that might be best suited for a particular learning context, should begin with a consideration of curricular outcomes (music subject matter). This is in sharp contrast to most other books on music technology that are technocentric, organized around specific software applications and hardware. The book also recognizes that knowing how to effectively use the technological tools to maximize learning (pedagogy) is a crucial aspect of the teaching-learning process. Drawing on the research and best practice literature in music education and related fields, pedagogical approaches that are aligned with curricular outcomes and specific technologies are suggested. It is not a “how to” book per se, but rather a text informed by the latest research, theories of learning, and documented best practices, with the goal of helping teachers develop the ability to understand the dynamics of effectively using technology for music learning.

Skryabin’s life spanned the tumultuous political events and artistic developments of the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth but was cut short before the end of the First World War. In an era when the Russian musical scene was relatively conservative, he aligned himself with the poets, philosophers, and dramatists of the Silver Age. Possessed by an apocalyptic vision, aspects of which he shared with other Russian thinkers and artists of the period, Skryabin transformed his Romantic musical style into a far-reaching, radical instrument for the expression of his ideas. The core of the book is a full translation of the 1919 Moscow publication of Skryabin’s writings with the original introduction by Skryabin’s close friend Boris de Schloezer, brother of the composer’s life partner, Tat′yana. Schloezer’s introduction gives a vivid impression of the final years of Skryabin’s life. This text is supplemented by relevant letters and other writings. The commentary has been researched from original materials, drawing on accounts by the composer’s friends and associates. The roots of Skryabin’s thought in ancient Greek and German idealist philosophy, the writings of Nietzsche, Indian culture, Russian philosophy, and the Theosophical writings of H. P. Blavatsky are analysed, and accounts of the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, the Poem of Fire show their relation to Skryabin’s world of ideas. A biographical section relates the development of the thought to the incidents of the composer’s life.

Spanning all cultures, rhythm is the basic pulse that animates poetry and music. The recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience—particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies—has yet to explore this fundamental category. Discussion of rhythm tends to be confined within the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With its original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, this volume opens up wider—and plural—perspectives. It examines formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Questions considered include: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? What is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? This collection provides a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience, and will appeal across disciplinary boundaries. It examines formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. The book is conceived throughout to appeal to a cross-disciplinary readership.

This book introduces the concept of sonic virtuality, a theory of sound that positions it as an emergent perception within a framework of virtuality. In its opposition to the acoustic or standard definition of sound, that sound is a sound wave, the thesis builds its case for a sonic aggregate as the virtual cloud of potentials from which the sound as perception emerges. This is argued for from a broad interdisciplinary perspective that assesses evidence and thinking from philosophy; acoustics and psychoacoustics; auditory science and neurology; sensation, perception, and cognition; cross-modality; writings on truth, knowledge, imagination, hallucination, belief, and alief; ontology and epistemology; embodied cognition; computer games and similar environments; acoustic ecology and ecological acoustics; sound design; and theories of reality, actuality, and virtuality. Throughout, the book is at pains to not only assess from many approaches this new way of conceptualizing sound but also to demonstrate the practical applications and advantages of the ideas and models that accompany it. This is accomplished through numerous illustrative examples that not only reference everyday experiences but also probe the future of audio design in the context of new and developing technologies.

Sound Unseen explores acousmatic sound—a sound that one hears without seeing its cause. Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in his Traité des objets musicaux, first popularized the term “acousmatic.” After an introduction, chapter 1 provides a thorough exegesis of Schaeffer’s theory of acousmatics. It also presents three objections to Schaeffer’s theories (myth, phantasmagoria, and ontology) around which the book is structured. In part I, the origins of the word acousmatic are traced from Pythagoras to 18th- century France, and then to the present. After showing the mythic use of the term throughout history, a rationale is given for a better way to uncover the history of acousmatic sound. In part II, a sketch of the history of acousmatic sound in music is presented, focusing on the use of unseen sounds in 19th- century music aesthetics and concert practice. A theory of acousmatic technê is presented. Then, through a reading of Kafka’s tale “The Burrow,” a theory of the ontology of acousmatic sound is presented that focuses on the roles of “spacing” (espacement) and underdetermination. In part III, the theory is applied in two case studies: first, on the guitarist and inventor Les Paul; and second, on the role of the acousmatic voice in 20th-century philosophy, starting with Husserl and Heidegger, and ending with Mladen Dolar,The book concludes with some final thoughts about acousmatic sound, music studies, and sound studies.

This book presents a case for teaching the arts to all children. It argues that, far from a luxury, the arts are a vitally important part of our society and our schools. Highlighting the crucial effect of the arts on learning, this volume shows how the arts can enliven and extend the entire school curriculum by integrating different subjects in innovative interdisciplinary ways. These eighteen chapters are a clarion call to action for any teacher, parent, policy maker, or citizen concerned about the fate of the arts in American society and schools.

Time in the Blues presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the specific forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues. Often described as immediate, spontaneous, and intense, the blues focus on the present moment, creating an experience of time for both performer and listener that is inflected by the material conditions that gave rise to the genre. Examining time as it is represented, enacted, and experienced through the blues engages questions concerning how material conditions in the early twentieth century shaped a musical genre. The formal characteristics of the blues—ostinato patterns, cyclical changes, improvisation, call and response—emerge from and speak to economic, social, and political relations under Jim Crow segregation. A close examination of the structuring of time under sharecropping, convict lease, and migration reveals their significance to aesthetic constraints in the blues. Likewise, contexts and frames of reception, such as traveling shows, advertisements for 78 rpm records, and a sense of tradition structure the experience of time for an audience of listeners. Blues music provides a rich and complex articulation of a dynamic form of resonant temporality that speaks against the dominant culture through its insistence on the present moment. Ultimately, Time in the Blues, argues for the relevance, significance, and importance of time in the blues for shared values of community and a vision of social justice.

There is no archive or museum of human movement where choreographies can be collected and conserved in pristine form. The central consequence of this is the incapacity of philosophy and aesthetics to think of dance as a positive and empirical art. In the eyes of philosophers, dance refers to a space other than art, considered both more frivolous and more fundamental than the artwork without ever quite attaining the status of a work. This book develops this idea and postulates a désoeuvrement (unworking) as evidenced by a conspicuous absence of references to actual choreographic works within philosophical accounts of dance; the late development and partial dominance of the notion of the work in dance in contrast to other art forms such as painting, music, and theatre; the difficulties in identifying dance works (and developing a philosophical theory of dance identity) given a lack of scores and an apparent resistance within the art form to the possibility of notation; and the questioning of “ends” of dance in contemporary practice and the relativization of the very idea that dance artistic or choreographic processes aim at work production.

A Way of Music Education: Classic Chinese Wisdoms presents a philosophy of music education rooted in Yijing (I-Ching or The Book of Changes), classic Confucianism, and classic Daoism, which matured in the mid-sixth to mid-third century BC China (pre-Qin period). This philosophy puts the human at the center of an organismic world, in which all matters and events are connected, be they musical or non-musical. It is human-centric and dao-centric. Music educational experiences are key attributes to musical well-being throughout one’s lifetime. Concepts of yin and yang, deep harmony, and the teachings of Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi are applied to propose a “trilogy”—change, balance, and liberation—as a way of thinking and practicing music education. Music education is viewed as a lifelong endeavor; the philosophy therefore calls for a dynamic flexibility to maintain a balanced life in constantly changing situations. While principles suggested in this philosophy are simple, it is critical to practice them persistently to achieve continuous improvements. Through extended practice in being musically proactive, a musical liberation can be achieved and a humanly human spirit can be preserved and sustained.

In the last decades most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between “high” and “low” art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and Blue Suede Shoes are equally valuable as cultural texts. This book challenges these dominant assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The book maintains that music is more than just “a matter of taste”: while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background noise, other music functions as art. This book considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in quite different ways to most of the other music that surrounds us. This long book aims to restore classical music's intrinsic aesthetic value and to rescue it from a designation as mere signifier of elitism or refinement.