"[This] is [an] ... introduction to current key issues and debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Chapters on standard topics are balanced by topics of interest to today's students, including creativity, authenticity, cultural appropriation, and te distinction between popular and fine art. Other topics include emotive expression, definitional strategies, and artistic value. ... Major current theories are set beside key ideas from Plato, Aristotle, [Immanuel] Kant, [Karl] Marx and [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ] Hegel. ..."--Back cover.
What is music for? Is it the same in a Haydn symphony, the jazz fusion of Jaco Pastorius, a raga by Ravi Shankar, and an improvised song of grief in Papua New Guinea? This extremely concise book offers an opinionated and example-filled survey of some fundamental and longstanding debates about the nature of music. The central arguments and ideas are presented with the goal of making them as accessible as possible to general readers who have no background in philosophy. The emphasis is on instrumental music, but examples are drawn from many cultures as well as from Western classical, jazz, folk, and popular music. The views of historical figures--Plato, Kant, Hanslick, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein--are compared with the views of leading contemporary philosophers of music--Stephen Davies, Peter Kivy, Kathleen Higgins, Malcolm Budd. Together, the four chapters in On Music show that music is a human universal that is culturally tailored to perform many different communicative functions. Performances of music are physically-embodied manifestations of human agency. Some performances express emotion. Some performances convey the mystical. Some just move our feet for dancing. But in every case, music speaks to us by drawing on both our innate musicality and our cultural traditions [Publisher description].
Grapples with the ways that rock shapes - limits and expands - our notions of
who we can be in the world. Going to the heart of this relationship between
the music's role in its performers' and fans' self-construction, this title
probes questions of gender and appropriation.
