The silent attentiveness expected of concert audiences is one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern Western musical culture. This is the first book to examine the concept of attention in the history of musical thought and its foundations in the writings of German musical commentators of the late eighteenth century. Those critics explained numerous technical features of the music of their time as devices for arousing, sustaining or otherwise influencing the attention of a listener, citing in illustration works by Gluck, C. P. E. Bach, Georg Benda and others. Two types of attention were identified: the uninterrupted experience of a single emotional state conveyed by a piece of music as a whole, and the fleeting sense of 'wonder' or 'astonishment' induced by a local event in a piece. The relative validity of these two modes was a topic of heated debate in the German Enlightenment, encompassing issues of musical communication, compositional integrity and listener competence. Matthew Riley examines the significant writers on the topic (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Rousseau, Meier, Sulzer and Forkel) and provides analytical case studies to illustrate how these perceived modes of attention shaped interpretations of music of the period.

Drawing upon the philosophical insights of Friedrich Schlegel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Blixa Bargeld, this book explores the persistence of a critical-deconstructive approach to musical production, consumption, and reception in the German cultural sphere of the last two centuries.

Attention is fundamental to how we experience reality, and yet this notion has been understood and practised in very different ways across history. This interdisciplinary study explores the dynamic relationship between attention and its supposed opposite, distraction, as it unfolds from the eighteenth century to the present day. Its primary focus is on twentieth-century Germany and Austria, where matters of (in)attention gained a unique urgency during a period of social change and political crisis. Building on Enlightenment practices of self-observation, nineteenth-century Germany was the birthplace of experimental psychology, a discipline which sought to measure and potentially enhance human attention. This approach was also adopted outside the psychological laboratory—for instance in the First World War, when psychological testing was used to select soldiers for particular strategic positions. After the war these techniques filtered through into everyday life. Weimar Germany was unique in the western world in rolling out the methods of 'psychotechnics' across civilian society—in fields such as work and education, advertising and mass entertainment. This state-sponsored programme aimed to reshape people's minds and behaviour in order to build a more efficient, streamlined society. But as this study shows, this initiative also had profound repercussions in the fields of thought, literature, and culture. New readings of leading writers and intellectuals of the period—Kafka, Musil, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno—are interspersed with broader cultural-historical chapters dedicated to the history of psychology and psychiatry, to Weimar self-help literature, portrait photography, and musical culture.

Does it make sense to refer to bird song—a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate—as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest? Redefining music as “the art of possibly animate things,” Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.

Interprets an eighteenth-century musical repertoire in sociable terms, both technically (specific musical patterns) and affectively (predominant emotional registers of the music).

The relationship between music and the nervous system is now the subject of intense interest for scientists and people in the humanities, but this is by no means a new phenomenon. This volume sets out the history of the relationship between neurology and music, putting the advances of our era into context.

In recent decades, the relationship between music, emotions, health and well-being has become a hot topic. Scientific research and new neuro-imaging technologies have provided extraordinary new insights into how music affects our brains and bodies, and researchers in fields ranging from psychology and music therapy to history and sociology have turned their attention to the question of how music relates to mind, body, feelings and health, generating a wealth of insights as well as new challenges. Yet this work is often divided by discipline and methodology, resulting in parallel, yet separate discourses. In this context, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being seeks to foster truly interdisciplinary approaches to key questions about the nature of musical experience and to demonstrate the importance of the conceptual and ideological frameworks underlying research in this field. Incorporating perspectives from musicology, history, psychology, neuroscience, music education, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and music therapy, this volume opens the way for a generative dialogue across both scientific and humanistic scholarship. The Companion is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first, historical section consider the varied ways in which music, the emotions, well-being and their interactions have been understood in the past, from Antiquity to the twentieth century, shedding light on the intellectual origins of debates that continue today. The chapters in the second, contemporary section offer a variety of current scientific perspectives on these topics and engage wider philosophical problems. The Companion ends with chapters that explore the practical application of music in healthcare, education and welfare, drawing on work on music as a social and ecological phenomenon. Contextualising contemporary scientific research on music within the history of ideas, this volume provides a unique overview of what it means to study music in relation to the mind and well-being.

Before the nineteenth century, instrumental music was considered inferior to vocal music. Kant described wordless music as "more pleasure than culture," and Rousseau dismissed it for its inability to convey concepts. But by the early 1800s, a dramatic shift was under way. Purely instrumental music was now being hailed as a means to knowledge and embraced precisely because of its independence from the limits of language. What had once been perceived as entertainment was heard increasingly as a vehicle of thought. Listening had become a way of knowing. Music as Thought traces the roots of this fundamental shift in attitudes toward listening in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on responses to the symphony in the age of Beethoven, Mark Evan Bonds draws on contemporary accounts and a range of sources--philosophical, literary, political, and musical--to reveal how this music was experienced by those who heard it first. Music as Thought is a fascinating reinterpretation of the causes and effects of a revolution in listening.

An idealized image of European concert-goers has long prevailed in historical overviews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This act of listening was considered to be an invisible and amorphous phenomenon, a naturally given mode of perception. This narrative influenced the conditions of listening from the selection of repertoire to the construction of concert halls and programmes. However, as listening moved from the concert hall to the opera house, street music, and jazz venues, new and visceral listening traditions evolved. In turn, the art of listening was shaped by phenomena of the modern era including media innovation and commercialization. This Handbook asks whether, how, and why practices of music listening changed as the audience moved from pleasure gardens and concert venues in the eighteenth century to living rooms in the twentieth century, and mobile devices in the twenty-first. Through these questions, chapters enable a differently conceived history of listening and offer an agenda for future research.

Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.