Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) ReviewAuthor Michael Spitzer develops Adorno's terminology into an extraordinarily supple conceptual vocabulary for describing, analyzing, and interpreting Beethoven's profoundly ambiguous late works. Spitzer draws on seminal works by musicologists Charles Rosen, Mark Evan Bonds, and Karl Dahlhaus - largely following in their footsteps, but at turns respectfully disagreeing with them.
Using the famous line of Schleiermacher - "there can be no concept of a style" - as an epigram, Spitzer proceeds to discuss several sorts of styles:
Style 1: Convention; in Beethoven's case, the high classical style inherited from Haydn, Mozart, et al.
Style 2: The Individual - the idiomatic, idiosyncratic inflexions developed by an individual composer.
Style 3: Nature - an appeal not to a Neo-Pythagorean recidivism, but to rules of the psychological Gestalt.
Finally we come to "late" style: which is not so much a style in itself, but a meta-style; in Beethoven, the late style is exemplified by the interaction of many different styles, particularly the Baroque; the Gallant; High Classical; and Beethoven's own Heroic style. This late style is significantly related to the "Wechsel der Toene" aesthetics articulated by Holderlin for his own late style, and is treated as the embodiment of concepts inexpressible in mere language.
Spitzer applies his terminology in extremely close and detailed readings of Beethoven's late works; I as a pianist was most interested in his work on Opp. 109, 110, and 111, which I found to be helpful not only as a conceptual guide but as an analysis that directly informs interpretation.
Before reading this book:
While I would recommend some familiarity with Hegelian dialectics and basic philosophical terminology, a background in Adorno is not necessary to the study of this book; Spitzer clearly articulates the terminology and concepts he is taking over from Adorno. An extensive background in music theory, however, is absolutely necessary - familiarity with classical sonata forms, ability to analyze counterpoint, harmony, phrase length, etc. Familiarity with Beethoven's life is also a "must."
Along with this book:
While this book includes extensive musical examples, I would suggest perusing it along with a complete score of the sonatas Opp. 109, 110, and 111; the Missa Solemnis; and recordings of the late string quartets (Opp. 127, 130, 131, 135) and, of course, the Ninth Symphony.Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) OverviewBeethoven's late style is the language of his ninth symphony, the MissaSolemnis, the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the Diabelli Variations, theBagatelles, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, and several smallerpiano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between theClassical and Romantic traditions: in terms of their musical structure, theycontinue to be regarded as revolutionary.Spitzer's book examinesthese late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the Germanintellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflictingapproaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from variousapproaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning, relating Adorno to suchwriters as Derrida, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as contemporary music theorists.Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (includingneo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's lastworks offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doingso created the musical language of premodernism.

Want to learn more information about Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession ReviewThere are questions that are too big for science; are there gods, for instance, or what is love? And maybe we will never fully find out scientifically why music does what it does and why we care about it so. But for many reasons, music ought to be a profitable subject for scientific enquiry. It is, as Pythagoras knew, an activity strongly rooted in mathematics, and the physics of music is fairly well understood. It is as universal as language; all human cultures have some sort of music, indicating it does something indispensable. And we are increasingly able to figure out, with our sophisticated brain imaging gadgets, what brains do when they hear or think about music. The neuroscience of music is the area of expertise of Daniel J. Levitin, and he writes of it in _This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession_ (Dutton), a fascinating account of current music psychology. Levitin has produced a book wonderfully accessible to lay readers, since although he is an academic (he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University), before he became a scientist, he had been a performing musician, sound engineer, and record producer, working with names like Steely Dan and Blue Oyster Cult. He does pull examples from Bach and Beethoven, but he is obviously more comfortable citing universally-known tunes like "Happy Birthday to You", "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", or "Stairway to Heaven". (Readers whose tastes range in previous epochs will possibly be surprised at the sophistication modern popular musicians have displayed.) Levitin has a good sense of humor and is a genial explainer.
He starts out with a forty page first chapter "What is Music?", which is as good a short explanation of key concepts as tone, scale, fifths, and timbre as anyone could want, and is a fine foundation for all that comes after, a collection of scientific lore and tidbits from all over. For instance, even if you are not a musician, you have a huge store of tunes in your memory. You may not have perfect pitch, the ability to know that an A flat is an A flat as soon as you hear it, but Levitin's own research has provided surprising evidence that your sense of pitch, even if you are not a musician, is really quite good. Subjects who were asked to sing a song from memory got the absolute pitch just right, or very close; they did the same with the song's tempo. There are differences in the brains of musicians and nonmusicians. The corpus callosum, the mass of fibers that connects the right brain hemisphere to the left, is larger in musicians, and is especially larger in those that started music training early. The overall lesson here, though, is that we are all musical, even if we are not musicians, and so non-expert musical brains are really very similar to expert ones. There are descriptions here of surprising research that makes clear how truly ready our brains are to incorporate musical experience. Fetuses in the last three months of gestation, for instance, can hear music within the womb, along with other outside and inside noises. Experiments have shown that if you repeatedly play a song into the womb, and then make sure the child does not hear it again after birth until it is one year old, and then play the music again, the infant will prefer hearing the womb-music rather than completely novel music. This was true whether the experimental music was Vivaldi or the Backstreet Boys.
Levitin certainly has connections; he tells of discussions with Francis Crick about themes in this book, as well as with Joni Mitchell. The final chapter, "The Music Instinct", is a response to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who spoke at a 1997 convention of researchers in music perception and cognition. Pinker took the dismissive stance that music was "auditory cheesecake", tickling the parts of the brain that were really for the important functions of language and (unlike language) useless as a force in human evolution. It is not surprising that Levitin and his fellow researchers disagree. Darwin himself felt that musical tones were used in conveying emotion and that those who were able to expend energy in singing or playing were demonstrating biological and sexual fitness. Musical success does make for high numbers of opportunities for spreading one's genes (just ask Mick Jagger). Interest in music peaks in adolescence, indicating a role in sexual selection. Music has been around longer than agriculture, and there is no evidence that language actually preceded music in our species. It may have promoted the cognitive development that was harnessed for speech. Only in the past few hundred years did music become a spectator activity, but in the eons when it could have shaped our social evolution, it was a group activity that may have promoted group togetherness and synchrony. It is an engaging final argument that serves to emphasize the importance of all that the book has presented before, a demonstration that looking at an important human activity in a scientific way only increases our wonder and delight in the activity itself.This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession Overview

Want to learn more information about This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

Language in the Brain Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Language in the Brain? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Language in the Brain. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Language in the Brain ReviewLanguage and the Brain demonstrates that locating the organization of language in narrow areas of the brain's cortex is wrong. Language isn't merely articulation and hearing of sounds. Organization of meaning, understanding, cognition, feeling and reasonable action are particularly important especially concerning the understanding of other people's feeling and knowledge.
The book emphasizes the contrast of neural and formal structure analysis. According to Helmut Schnelle as a consequence, interdisciplinary research cannot be avoided.Language in the Brain OverviewLinguistics, neurocognition, and phenomenological psychology are fundamentally different fields of research. Helmut Schnelle provides an interdisciplinary understanding of a new integrated field in which linguists can be competent in neurocognition and neuroscientists in structure linguistics. Consequently the first part of the book is a systematic introduction to the function of the form and meaning-organising brain component - with the essential core elements being perceptions, actions, attention, emotion and feeling. Their descriptions provide foundations for experiences based on semantics and pragmatics. The second part is addressed to non-linguists and presents the structural foundations of currently established linguistic frameworks. This book should be serious reading for anyone interested in a comprehensive understanding of language, in which evolution, functional organisation and hierarchies are explained by reference to brain architecture and dynamics.

Want to learn more information about Language in the Brain?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...