| Contents |
The philosophy of music. Dream -- On the history of music. Beginnings -- The method ; The technical success ; The sociological context ; The explosive youth of music ; The problem of a philosophy of musical history -- Fulness and its schema ; The song ; On Mozart ; The passions ; Bach, his form and his object ; Carmen ; Open-ended song and Fidelio ; Missa solemnis ; The birth of the sonata ; Brahms and chamber music ; Beethoven, his form, his object and the spirit of the sonata ; Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner ; On Wagner ; Forerunners ; False polemics ; Speech-song, syncopated rhythm and chordal polyphony ; The transcendent opera and its object -- On the theory of music. Practice and composition ; Inflexion ; Attack ; The creative musical setting -- Interpretation, or On the relation between absolute and speculative music ; The 'what' of expression in general ; The philosophical theory of music -- Means, formulae, forms and phenomenal aspect of the transcending theory of music ; The note as means ; The theory of harmony as formula ; Relations of rhythm as form ; Bachian and Beethovenian counterpointing as form and incipient ideogram ; The note again, not as means but as a phenomenal entity ; On the thing-in-itself in music -- The mystery -- Magic rattle, human harp -- Paradoxes and the pastorale in Wagner's music. Some preliminary remarks ; Starting afresh ; The question of bel canto ; The question of the paradoxes ; The question of the omniscient leitmotif ; The question of the resonant pastorale -- On the mathematical and dialectical character in music -- The exceeding of limits and the world of man at its most richly intense in music. The good fortune of the blind ; Syrinx the nymph ; Bizarre hero and nymph: 'Symphonie Fantastique' ; Human expression as inseparable from music ; Music as canon and ordered world, harmony of the spheres, more humane pole-stars ; Tone painting, work of nature again, the intensity and morality of music ; The hollow space, the subject of the sonata and fugue ; Funeral march, requiem, procession behind death ; Marseillaise and twinkling of an eye in 'Fidelio.' |
| Abstract |
This volume contains a selection of essays in translation by the German philosopher and man of letters Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), on the philosophy of music. For Bloch--often simply assimilated to the Marxist tradition, but whose thought shows a strongly individual and idealist cast--music was a primary focus on reflection. His musical knowledge and expertise were of a very high order and he was well acquainted with many of the leading composers and theorists of music of his time in Germany: even divorced from his philosophy his criticism remains of value and significance. Throughout, whether discussing the complex and varied relations between text and music, or questions relating to the 'expressive' as opposed to the 'descriptive' functions of music, Bloch is intent on elucidating and placing musical experience. |
