This is an important piece of work from an influential and
highly-acclaimed theorist exploring the New Musicology and other
debates in recent philosophy of music
- Christopher Norris is one of the world's leading philosophy
scholars with a truly international reputation
- This is an important piece of work from an influential and
highly-acclaimed theorist, a must-read for students, scholars and
thinkers working in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Music
- This book offers a new and original examination of musical
understanding and the relationship between music and philosophical
thought.
What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the
standards (if any) that they set for a competent, intelligent, and
musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Should the
work-concept henceforth be dissolved as some New Musicologists
would have it into the various, ever-changing socio-cultural or
ideological contexts that make up its reception-history to date?
Can music be thought of as possessing certain attributes,
structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that are
response-transcendent, i.e., that might always elude or surpass the
best state of (current or future) informed opinion?
These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses
by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology
and other debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the
case for a qualified Platonist approach that would respect the
relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less
adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement. At
the same time this approach would leave room for listeners share
the phenomenology of musical experience in so far as those works
necessarily depend for their repeated realisation from one
performance or audition to the next upon certain subjectively
salient modalities of human perceptual and cognitive
response.
Norris argues for a more philosophically and musically informed
treatment of these issues that combines the best insights of the
analytic and the continental traditions. Perhaps the most
distinctive feature of Norris's book, true to this dual
orientation, is its way of raising such issues through a constant
appeal to the vivid actuality of music as a challenge to
philosophic thought. This is a fascinating study of musical
understanding from one of the worlds leading contemporary
theorists.
Table of contents:
Introduction
1. Platonism, Music, and the 'Listener's
Share'
2. On Knowing What We Like: 'best opinion' and
evaluative warrant
3. What's In a Work? music, ontology, and the
'deconstructive turn'
4. Between Phenomenology and Structuralism: alternative resources
for music theory
5. Music, Pleasure, and the Claims of Analysis
Christopher Norris is a leading contemporary theorist. He has taught at the University of California Berkeley, CUNY and Dartmouth College, USA. He is currently Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK.
Inhaltsangabe
Introduction 1. Platonism, Music, and the 'Listener's Share' 2. On Knowing What We Like: 'best opinion' and evaluative warrant 3. What's In a Work? music, ontology, and the 'deconstructive turn' 4. Between Phenomenology and Structuralism: alternative resources for music theory 5. Music, Pleasure, and the Claims of Analysis.
