Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
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; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that 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 with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'.
- Written in short sharp chapters with illustrations to pick out critical details over a period of 500 years
- It is interdisciplinary, discussing the effect of secularisation, perspective, medical science, philosophy and politics on music
- It deals with both discourses about music (music theorists, philosophers, etc.) and examines the music itself (works by Monteverdi, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart)
Reviews & endorsements
'… has been explored by other writers before Chua, but he gives it an extra twist by setting it in the larger and longer story of Western civilisation's 'disenchantment'.' BBC Music Magazine
Product details
November 1999Hardback
9780521631815
328 pages
236 × 159 × 23 mm
0.575kg
11 b/w illus. 44 music examples
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- On the preface
- Part I. The Garden of Eden:
- 1. On history
- 2. On modernity
- 3. On disenchantment
- 4. On division
- 5. On opera
- 6. On machines
- 7. On space
- 8. On style
- Part II. The Fruit of Knowledge:
- 9. On being
- 10. On the mind
- 11. On biology
- 12. On the body
- 13. On the soul
- 14. On morality
- 15. On women
- 16. On masculinity
- 17. On independence
- 18. On heroes
- 19. On politics
- 20. On nothing
- 21. On God
- 22. On infinity
- 23. On self-deification
- 24. On invisibility
- 25. On conscious life-forms
- 26. On artificiality
- Part III. The Tower of Babel:
- 27. On death
- 28. On absolute music
- 29. On the beautiful and the sublime
- 30. On monuments
- 31. On the apocalypse
- 32. On the end
- 33. On suicide
- 34. On absolute drivel
- 35. On Babel
- Bibliography
- Index.
