Absolute music and the construction of meaning
By: Daniel K.L. Chua.
Series: New perspectives in music history and criticism
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 314
Subjects: Absolute music; Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics
Description: "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 nineteenth 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 nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.