Andrew Hicks
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190658205
- eISBN:
- 9780190658236
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658205.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Philosophy of Music
This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of
a cosmos animated and ...
More
This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of
a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. It offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmology and affirms music theory’s foundational and often normative role within the articulation and development of medieval cosmological models. Offering a counternarrative to the dominant conception of a Weberian “disenchantment,” which regards the harmonious, numerically organized natural world as the hallmark of a premodern worldview that was eventually (for better or worse) discredited and abandoned, this book interrogates the musical, mathematical, philosophical, and discursive strategies employed by ancient and medieval cosmologists in their construction of a harmonious world grounded in material interactions and intermaterial relations. It traces these strategies across the familiar terrain of the Boethian tripartition of music into “instrumental,” “human,” and “cosmic,” and reveals the myriad ways in which this basic tripartition was reinterpreted by Boethius’s twelfth-century readers in the light of other received Platonic texts, especially Plato’s Timaeus. The picture that results from this counternarrative is one in which the recent resurgence of vibrational and relational ontologies resonate, tellingly and productively, with the forgotten history of their medieval antecedents, in the writings of Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Peter Abelard, Bernard Silvestris, and Alain de Lille.Less
This book charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within late ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of
a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. It offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmology and affirms music theory’s foundational and often normative role within the articulation and development of medieval cosmological models. Offering a counternarrative to the dominant conception of a Weberian “disenchantment,” which regards the harmonious, numerically organized natural world as the hallmark of a premodern worldview that was eventually (for better or worse) discredited and abandoned, this book interrogates the musical, mathematical, philosophical, and discursive strategies employed by ancient and medieval cosmologists in their construction of a harmonious world grounded in material interactions and intermaterial relations. It traces these strategies across the familiar terrain of the Boethian tripartition of music into “instrumental,” “human,” and “cosmic,” and reveals the myriad ways in which this basic tripartition was reinterpreted by Boethius’s twelfth-century readers in the light of other received Platonic texts, especially Plato’s Timaeus. The picture that results from this counternarrative is one in which the recent resurgence of vibrational and relational ontologies resonate, tellingly and productively, with the forgotten history of their medieval antecedents, in the writings of Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, Peter Abelard, Bernard Silvestris, and Alain de Lille.
Naomi Waltham-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190662004
- eISBN:
- 9780190662035
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190662004.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Philosophy of Music
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that ...
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In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.Less
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights. The book’s theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates about relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions, and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.
Accounting for Oneself
Adjusting to a World in Motion
Advancing the Human Right to Health
Aid and Development
The AIDS Generation
Aliens and Strangers?
The Alternatives to War
Altruism in Humans
American Arcadia
