What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have
struggled to isolate the essence of" pure" or" absolute" music in ways that also account for its …

With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single
music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints." Essential …

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 nineteenth century; …

This monumental history of Western music and musical culture has stood for the past half-
century as the definitive work of its kind. Vast in scope, it begins with the music of ancient …

Antithetical Arts constitutes a defence of musical formalism against those who would put
literary interpretations on the absolute music canon. In Part I, the historical origins of both the …

What does music have to say about modernity? How can this apparently unworldly art tell us
anything about modern life? In Out of Time, author Julian Johnson begins from the idea that …

In his influential book The Idea of Absolute Music, Carl Dahlhaus claimed there was 'a
comprehensive concept of “absolute” music which reveals the latent unity of musical …

This pathbreaking work reveals the pivotal role of music--musical works and musical culture--
in debates about society, self, and culture that forged European modernity through the" long …

If in earlier eras music may have seemed slow to respond to advances in other artistic
media, during the modernist age it asserted itself in the vanguard. Modernism and Music …

This book is an introduction to the esthetics of music. Aesthetics, which were of prime
importance in thinking about music in the nineteenth century, are today sometimes …