Peter Kivy presents a selection of his new and recent writings on the philosophy of music, a subject to which he has for many years been one of the most eminent contributors. In his distinctively elegant and informal style, Kivy explores such topics as musicology and its history, the nature ofmusical works, and the role of emotion in music, in a way that will attract the interest of philosophical and musical readers alike. Most of the essays are published here for the first time, all of them are accessible and self-standing, and so there is much here to delight both followers of Kivy'swork and those who are new to it.

The first new survey of the field in more than 60 years, this study concentrates on the basics of music criticism. Because it focuses on core issues and proven principles, the book is likely to become the standard work on the subject. It is written for the audience that reads music criticism in newspapers and popular journals: professional and amateur musicians, scholars, teachers, researchers, librarians, students, music lovers, journalists, and critics. The topics are covered in depth and observations are thoroughly documented, yet the material is enjoyable to read because the writing is easy to understand and special terminology is held to an absolute minimum. The commentary addresses the function of music criticism, the qualifications and training of a critic, the relationship between music criticism and other aspects of journalism, and the principles behind value judgments. Three chapters are devoted to the concert and opera review, one to reviewing recordings, another to radio and television criticism, and one to reviewing ethnic music. Thirty-eight reviews are quoted and analyzed, and 13 are presented in their entirety, along with critical commentary. Index. Appendix. Bibliography

Opera is the only guide to the research writings on all aspects of opera. This second edition presents 2,833 titles--over 2,000 more than the first edition--of books, parts of books, articles and dissertations with full bibliographic descriptions and critical annotations. Users will find the core literature on the operas of 320 individual composers and details of operatic life in 43 countries. All relevant works through to November 1999 have been considered, covering more than fifteen years of literature since the first edition was published.

The volume includes twenty-five research papers presented as gifts to John L. Bell to celebrate his 60th birthday by colleagues, former students, friends and admirers. Like Bell’s own work, the contributions cross boundaries into several inter-related fields. The contributions are new work by highly respected figures, several of whom are among the key figures in their fields. Some examples: in foundations of maths and logic (William Lawvere, Peter Aczel, Graham Priest, Giovanni Sambin); analytical philosophy (Michael Dummett, William Demopoulos), philosophy of science (Michael Redhead, Frank Arntzenius), philosophy of mathematics (Michael Hallett, John Mayberry, Daniel Isaacson) and decision theory and foundations of economics (Ken Bimore). Most articles are contributions to current philosophical debates, but contributions also include some new mathematical results, important historical surveys, and a translation by Wilfrid Hodges of a key work of arabic logic.

Ernst Krenek has been described as a “one-man history of twentieth-century music.” His vast compositional output encompasses many of its extremes and expresses many of its contradictions. Few have attempted, however, to contextualize Krenek’s compositional output because our understanding of classical music in the first half of the twentieth century still largely remains focused on the music of a few canonical figures. Responding to renewed interest from performers in Krenek’s work, particularly his operas, Peter Tregear’s Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style addresses this gap in the scholarly literature and makes an important contribution to our comprehension of the ways in which his music reflected and informed broader social and political debates in Austria and Germany at the time. Focusing on Krenek’s compositional path from the eclectic musical language of Jonny spielt auf to the austere twelve-tone technique of Karl V, Tregear provides an historical and critical context to this most historically significant period of Krenek’s creative life. His study also enriches our understanding of many of Krenek’s contemporaries, such as Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. This book should interest students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in modern opera, and contemporary classical music as well as early-20th-century German history more generally.

This title was first published in 2001: Unlike many other academic disciplines, musicology has been somewhat reluctant to explore the possibilities that critical theory might offer to our understanding of music and the ways in which we study it. In recent years, however, both the general impact of theory on humanities research and the wider repertoires now studied on music degree courses have urged a paradigm shift in musicology. Looking at both these trends, Alastair Williams examines and explains the theoretical issues raised by different musics, including the Western canon, popular music, folk music and music by women. A theoretically informed musicology, he argues, can reflect on its own procedures and create strategies for particular problems as they arise. In this sense the book offers a musicology under construction. To appreciate how theoretical discourses function and the interests they serve, it is important to understand their roots. Chapter One begins with a presentation of traditional musicology in the context of Joseph Kerman's call for a shift from fact-finding to critical interpretation. Discussion then moves to the scrutiny of the bourgeois tradition by Adorno and Dahlhaus. Chapter Two explores Kerman's critique of structural analysis, together with the impact of poststructuralism on musicology. Awareness of new repertoire and its consequences becomes evident as the book unfolds, with Chapter Three considering music by women and examining how gender is constructed in music. Chapter Four extends this discussion to the field of popular music and the ways in which this genre negotiates identity. Challenges to the dominant values are further explored as Chapter Five looks at how non-European cultures are presented in European music and reflects on perceptions of self and other in ethnomusicology. Chapter Six charts the emergence of modern subjectivity and its formations in music, arguing that musicology should not lose sight of modernity's critical resources.

First published in 2011. Johannes Brahms: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer. The second edition will include research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources.

This book addresses the complex conceptual, historical, and philosophical questions posed by Eduard Hanslick’s influential aesthetic treatise, On the Musically Beautiful (1854). The contributions reveal the philosophical foundations and subtleties of his aesthetic approach. The collection features original essays written by leading scholars in philosophical aesthetics and musicology. It covers many of Hanslick’s overarching themes, such as the relationship between beauty and form, between music and emotion, and the role of imagination and performance in music, which have recently gained prominence in Hanslick scholarship. The chapters, divided into five thematic sections, will provide a better scholarly foundation for a deeper understanding of On the Musically Beautiful and its arguments. In bringing together the various approaches and accounts of the different textual, historical, conceptual, and philosophical challenges posed by Hanslick’s aesthetics, The Aesthetic Legacy of Eduard Hanslick will appeal to philosophers of music, historians of aesthetics, musicologists specializing in 19th-century studies, and music theorists working on aesthetic issues.

Poetry and music have seldom been more closely associated than at the end of the nineteenth century, and the texts in which Baudelaire and Wagner, Mallarmé and Scriabin, Maeterlinck and Debussy evoked the reader’s and the listener’s states of mind are unusually rich in suggestion. Can poetry combine, as music seems to do, the transcendent satisfaction of an all-inclusive viewpoint with the excitement and uncertainty of an unfolding narrative? Can it partake of music’s power in order to give a face to the idea, and substitute, without disappointing, a definite variation for the ineffable theme? Symbolist writers intent on achieving musical effects in words looked for ways to overcome the hard division of subjects at the foundation of language, and the strategies they invented, while not always successful, show their supreme expectations concerning the receptive capability of their audience and an unqualified belief in the transforming power of their art. Students of aesthetics, of French and comparative literature should find something of interest in this provocative and original book. For ease of reference, a detailed abstract of the contents is provided, along with English translations of all quotations in other languages.

This is the first comprehensive study of the trombone in English. It covers the instrument, its repertoire, the way it has been played, and the social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts within which it has developed. The book explores the origins of the instrument, its invention in the fifteenth century, and its story up to modern times, also revealing hidden aspects of the trombone in different eras and countries. The book looks not only at the trombone within classical music but also at its place in jazz, popular music, popular religion, and light music. Trevor Herbert examines each century of the trombone's development and details the fundamental impact of jazz on the modern trombone. By the late twentieth century, he shows, jazz techniques had filtered into the performance idioms of almost all styles of music and transformed ideas about virtuosity and lyricism in trombone playing.