文档介绍：Absolute Music
and the Construction
of Meaning
DANIEL K. L. CHUA
Cambridge University Press
Absolute Music
This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the
making of meaning in a musical form that was made to empty its
meaning at the turn of the eenth century; secondly, it is a history
of a music that claims to have no history – absolute music. The book
therefore writes against the notion of absolute music which tends to
be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is
concerned not so much with what music is, but why and how
meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of
knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. Instead of
existing in a pure and autonomous form, music is woven back into
the epistemological fabric, and tangled with the discourses of
theology, visual perspective, biology, philosophy, gender, chemistry,
politics, physics. Such contextualisation, far from diminishing the
significance of music, actually demonstrates the centrality of music
in the construction of modernity. From the thought of Vincenzo
Galilei to that of Theodor Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that
instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in
modernity, even with its eenth-century apotheosis as ‘absolute
music’.
The book discusses the ideas of thinkers such as Vincenzo Galilei,
Descartes, Diderot, Rameau, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Hanslick, Wagner, Max Weber and Adorno and considers the works
posers such as Monteverdi, C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, Mozart and,
most importantly, Beethoven, whose music defines the notion of
absolute music for the eenth and twentieth century.
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New perspectives in music history
and criticism
general editors
jeffrey kallberg, anthony b and ruth solie
This series explores the conceptual frameworks that shape or have
shaped the ways in which we understand music and its history, and
aims to ela