THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC (2025)

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Review: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music

Scott Gleason

Current Musicology, 2012

At least since Plato the problematic of philosophizing about music, or even conceiving a kind of musical philosophy, has conditioned our discourses. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music shares in this problematic but raises its stakes, encouraging us to renew our attempts to think music philosophically. It accomplishes its primary goal admirably: it could very well accompany discussions of music and philosophy for some time to come. The articles it contains are for the most part emphatically if not explicitly written from the perspective of analytic philosophy, which suggests certain disciplinary alignments: music theory and cognition seem to align easily with analytic philosophy, whereas ethnomusicology and historical musicology seem to align with continental philosophy. One of the strengths of the Companion is its ability to appeal to readers from seemingly every music–academic discipline. The Companion thus provides a new standard of philosophical conversation toward which musicians can aspire.

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"Recentering Musicology and the Philosophy of Music"

nick zangwill

Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2014

I defend a non-reductionist view of music, according to which music should be understood in terms of musical beauty. I suggest that general theories of music are legitimate, and I discuss sublimity and argue that it is a species of beauty. Musical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties of that are realized in sounds. Sometimes, when we are fortunate, this experience generates pleasure in musical beauty. As Hanslick rightly insisted, there is no way to begin to understand what music is, or to understand its value and why we value it, without putting musical beauty in the foreground and celebrating our experience of it. This positive position has negative consequences. Musical appreciation does not require pathologies of emotion, spurious political narratives, intimations of religious profundity and so on. The value is in the sounds. It is an immanent value, not a transcendent one. It is a this-worldly value, not an other-worldly delusion, or something self-indulgently in us. Musical beauty is there in the sounds, in "tones and their artistic combination," as Hanslick maintained.

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The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

Nanette Nielsen

2020

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approaches), and a range of cognate disciplines (such as critical theory and intellectual history). The Handbook includes, but does not confine itself to, consideration of key questions in aesthetics and the philosophy of music. Each essay provides an introduction to its topic, an assessment of past scholarship, and a research-driven argument for the future of the research area in question. Taken together, these essays provide a current snapshot of this field and outline an abundance of ways in which it might develop in the future.

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Musicology for Art Historians

Jonathan Hicks

The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture, 2011

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Introduction to Special Issue: "Contemplating Music across Cultures and Contexts: Philosophical Perspectives"

Jonathan L Friedmann

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023

The difficulty of capturing or deciphering music in words is largely why the same questions continue to be asked and the same tensions continue to be explored. Contributors to this special issue add fresh perspectives and new insights to these enduring themes and inquiries, looking at music in both the general sense and examining specific musical pieces, movements, and moments. Each article has its own focus, makes its own arguments, and occupies its own branch(es) of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, and, of course, aesthetics. Beyond the centralizing subject of music, what ties them together and into the best of philosophical traditions is that they not only ask big questions but also, in seeking to answer them, add more questions to the ongoing discourse.

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Music's intellectual history

Zdravko Blazekovic

2009

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Further ruminations on music

Arnold Berleant

New Sound

This article examines the implications for aesthetics of using music as a model. It pursues the question of how music could stand as the paradigm of art in general as a cultural practice.

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Clayton et al The Cultural Study of Music 2003

Martin Chamorro

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Davies2021Evolutionin Oxford Hbook Music Philosophy

Stephen Davies

The Oxcford Hanbook of Western Music and Philosophy, 2021

Making or listening to music is pan-cultural, nearly universal, and highly valued. Musical behaviors probably appeared between 500,000 and 60,000 years ago. The more recent date captures the era when H. sapiens spread globally from Africa. The older date corresponds with a time when song might have produced individual or social benefits and the physiological and cognitive conditions for its production were present (in our predecessor, H. heidelbergensis). Music is so multi-functional, however, that it is not clear if it was an evolutionary adaptation (as opposed to a byproduct or non-biological technology) or, if so, what it was an adaptation for.

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Zdravko Blazekovic

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC (2025)
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