In an age when our patterns of music consumption are changing rapidly, musical understanding has never been more relevant. Understanding Music provides readers with an ideal entry point to the topic, addressing 'both the music lover who has made listening to music an important part of his life and at the same time is willing to reflect on music and his encounter with it, as well as the more academically-minded enthusiast and the thoughtful expert.' Its author, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, was one of the most influential German musicologists of the twentieth century and yet he is almost unknown to English readers. His published work stretches from one end of the musicological spectrum to the other, with research on historical topics in early music, Bach, Beethoven reception, Mahler and music aesthetics all featuring. Understanding Music summarizes Eggebrecht's thoughts on the relationship between music and cognition. As he says in his preface, the purpose of his book is 'to direct the reader towards the fundamental issues and processes implied in understanding music. What does understanding mean when applied to music? How is the process to be described? What different kinds of understanding are to be distinguished here? What other concepts are implicit in and related to the concept of understanding? How is the relationship between music and the listener who understands it to be articulated? What might correct understanding of music mean given music's multiplicity of meaning and effect? Where are the limits of understanding and what lies beyond? What role do language and history play?'. Eggebrecht's answers to these and other questions amount to a compelling account of how the mind grasps the sounds of music in themselves and what other factors contribute to music's meaning so much to us as listeners.

With Understanding Music and The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Roger Scruton set a new standard of rigour and seriousness in the philosophy of music. This collection of wide-ranging essays covers all aspects of the theory and practice of music, showing the significance of music as an expression of the moral life. The book is split into two parts, the first is devoted to the aesthetics and theory of music and the second consists of critical studies of individual composers, thinkers and works including essays on Mozart, Wagner, Beethoven's Ninth, Janácek & Schoenberg, Szymanowski and Adorno. Understanding Music will appeal to specialists in philosophy and musicology and also to music lovers who wish to find deeper meaning in this mysterious art. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new preface from the author.

Gateways to Understanding Music, Second Edition, explores music in all the categories that constitute contemporary musical experience: European classical, popular, jazz, and world music. Covering the oldest forms of human music making to the newest, this chronology presents music from a global rather than a Eurocentric perspective. Each of 60 "gateways" addresses a particular genre, style, or period of music. Every gateway opens with a guided listening example that unlocks a world of music through careful study of its structural elements. How did the piece come to be composed or performed? How did it respond to the social and cultural issues at the time, and what does that music mean today? Students learn to listen to, explain, understand, and ultimately value all the music they encounter in their world. New to this edition is a broader selection of musical examples that reflect the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion advocated by North American universities. Eight gateways have been replaced. A timeline of gateways helps students see the book’s historical narrative at a glance. Features Values orientation—Diverse, equitable, and inclusive approach to music history. All genres of music—Presents all music as worthy of study, including classical, world, popular, and jazz. Global scope within a historical narrative—Begins with small-scale forager societies up to the present, with a shifting focus from global to European to American influences. Recurring themes — Aesthetics, emotion, social life, links to culture, politics, economics, and technology. Modular framework—60 gateways—each with a listening example—allow flexibility to organize chronologically or by the seven themes. Consistent structure—With the same step-by-step format, students learn through repeated practice how to listen and how to think about music. Anthology of scores—For those courses that use the textbook in a music history sequence. Gateways to Understanding Music continues to employ a website to host the audio examples and instructor’s resources.

This book explores a child-centred perspective on music education. It examines how children engage with, and think about, music and how an understanding of this can support high-quality teaching and learning.

The purpose of this book is to provide insight into the compositional process to enable listeners, interpreters, and creators of music to advance their skills through a series of guided activities. Listeners can use this book to increase their musical understanding and appreciation. Developing performers, educators and conductors can use this book to gain valuable insights to assist them with interpreting music beyond what is printed on the page. Developing composers can use this book as a beginning text or to help refine their compositional techniques.Free downloadable mp3 files at http://www.lulu.com/content/446296 contain MIDI performances of most of the examples used in the chapters. Purchase of the book entitles the reader to join a free on-line discussion group that is moderated by the author. You can share experiences, comments and questions regarding subjects that are covered in the book and to respond to other reader's posts. The author will also contribute to the discussions.

The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.

The book brings together a selection of Malcolm Budd's essays in aesthetics. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art and the artistic expression of emotion. Other essays are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining certain well-known views, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the volume is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late.