| Contents |
Aesthetics and music in Ancient Greece. Music and mousikē, art and technē ; The Pythagorean and Platonic-Pythagorean mathematical conception ; The ethical conception, and Plato's more empirically-minded successors Aristotle and Aristoxenus ; The separation of the value spheres ; Medieval and Renaissance musical thought -- The concept of music. The possibility of non-musical aural or sound-art ; The concept of music ; Sounds, tones and sound-art -- The aesthetics of form, the aesthetics of expression, and 'absolute music': aesthetics of music in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Romantic metaphysics of music ; Kant and formalism ; Hegel: historicism and truth-content ; Schopenhauer and Wagner: absolute music ; Nietzsche: the Apollonian and the Dionysian ; Hanslick and formalism ; Expression, form and absolute music -- The sound of music. The acousmatic experience of sound ; Pythagoras and musique concrète ; A broader definition of 'acousmatic' ; Objections to the acousmatic thesis ; The twofold thesis ; A humanistic conception of music versus more abstract conceptions -- Rhythm and time. Music as an art of time ; The universality of rhythm ; A Platonic, organic definition ; Rhythm and metre ; Rhythm and accent ; Rhythm and movement -- Adorno and modernism: music as autonomous and 'social fact'. The advent of modernism ; Adorno's aesthetics of modernism ; Adorno and Kant: art as autonomous and purposeless ; Adorno and Hegel: dialectic, historicism and truth-content ; Adorno and Marx: art as commodity or social fact ; The culture industry ; Music of the avant-garde: Adorno's limited grounds for optimism ; Dialectics and the autonomy of art -- Improvisation and composition. The aesthetics of perfection and imperfection ; The concept of improvisation and 'improvised feel' ; Spontaneity and the aesthetics of perfection ; Free improvisers, interpreters and 'improvisation as a compositional method'. |
