This volume examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical backgrounds. In exploring the origins of the idea and its career

This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nin

What we think music is shapes how we hear it. This book traces the history of the idea of pure - 'absolute' - music from Pythagoras to the present, with special

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rou

This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of th