Conceptualizing Music
Subtitle: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Ams Studies in Music Series)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: October 18, 2002
Language: eng
Number of pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9780195140231
First sentence: In the opening eleven measures of the prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde there are three successive statements of a melodic motive that foreshadows, and then later accompanies, the tragic arc of the opera.
Description: "Music theory is often seen as an arcane and somewhat forbidding discipline which stands at a distance from the sweet pleasure and sensuous thrill that is music. Theory, according to this view, is concerned with scales and chords and intervals, or with complicated and highly abstract systems of musical relationships. It is not concerned with how music captivates us. But Lawrence Zbikowski argues that this common view of music theory is wrong. Theorizing about music is something we do every time we try to make sense of our musical experience, and it involves the same cognitive capacities we use to make sense of the world as a whole.

The play of concepts and conceptual structures typical of music theory is thus not something remote from our appreciation of music, but is instead basic to it."--Jacket.