For over a century, Richard Wagner's music has been the subject of intense debate among philosophers, many of whom have attacked its ideological-some say racist and reactionary-underpinnings. In this major new work, Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers a detailed reading of the critical responses to the composer's work, which include Adorno's writings on the composer and Wagner's recuperation by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and others. Slavoj Zizek provides an afterword, and both philosophers make a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to the contemporary world.

This collection explores Rancière's thought along a number of music-historical trajectories, including Italian and German opera, Romantic and modernist music, Latin American and South African music, jazz, and contemporary popular music, and sets him in dialogue with key thinkers including Adorno, Althusser, Badiou and Deleuze.

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

The oeuvre of Alain Badiou has gained international success and recognition, but most of the secondary literature focuses on internal problems of Badiou's philosophy, rather than its position within a broader philosophical genealogy. This book unites philosophers from Germany, Slovenia, the UK, Australia and France, to trace the relation between elements of Badiou's philosophy and the German philosophical tradition, namely the three significant movements of German Idealism, Phenomenology, Marxism and the Frankfurt School. This is a discussion that has not yet been established, although the parallels and decisive differences between poststructuralist French philosophy and German philosophy are apparent. Through these paradigms – Badiou's reception of German Idealism, Marxism, Adorno and the Critical Theory, and Heideggerian phenomenology – the authors shed light onto Badiou's inheritance of and engagement with these specific traditions, but also highlight the links between these philosophies to open up new questions for contemporary continental thought. With an original chapter from Alain Badiou himself, looking back at his influences and antagonisms within the German tradition, this book is essential for readers interested in the exploration of Badiou's legacy. It illustrates the continuation of poststructuralist philosophy, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, assessing the place of classic continental philosophy to tackle how we might benefit from these intellectual exchanges today.

Beyond Reason relates Wagner’s works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

Why do we find it hard to explain what happens when words are set to music? This study looks at the kind of language we use to describe word/music relations, both in the academic literature and in manuals for singers or programme notes prepared by professional musicians. Helen Abbott's critique of word/music relations interrogates overlaps emerging from a range of academic disciplines including translation theory, adaptation theory, word/music theory, as well as critical musicology, métricométrie, and cognitive neuroscience. It also draws on other resources-whether adhesion science or financial modelling-to inform a new approach to analysing song in a model proposed here as the assemblage model. The assemblage model has two key stages of analysis. The first stage examines the bonds formed between the multiple layers that make up a song setting (including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound repetition, semantics, and live performance options). The second stage considers the overall outcome of each song in terms of the intensity or stability of the words and music present in a song (accretion/dilution). Taking the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) as its main impetus, the volume examines how Baudelaire's poetry has inspired composers of all genres across the globe, from the 1860s to the present day. The case studies focus on Baudelaire song sets by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, it tests out the assemblage model to uncover what happens to Baudelaire's poetry when it is set to music. It factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, and reveals which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting, and where composers diverge in their approach.

"The Pianolist, A Guide for Pianola Players" by Gustav Kobbé is a comprehensive manual for those seeking to master the art of playing the pianola, a mechanical instrument reproducing piano music. With detailed instructions on technique and interpretation and an extensive repertoire of music, this book is an essential resource for pianola enthusiasts and aspiring musicians alike.

Freedom of expression and its direct counterpart, censorship and silencing, are increasingly gaining attention in the world of art and culture. Through the growth of social media and its worldwide distribution, arts and cultural products are shared, and the increased visibility and audibility of culture is highlighted through iconic and pivotal clashes, such as the fatwa on The Satanic Verses in 1989, the recurring bans on the music of Wagner, the alleged censorship of playlists following 9/11, and the cartoon crisis in 2006. This volume takes the discussion directly to the field of music studies in a broad frame and insists on examining music censorship in a global perspective. The book addresses the important and increasingly relevant issue of scholarship on music censorship and thus contributes to a detailed understanding of the phenomenon. Often, words and semantic meaning are held to be determining to the restrictions on musicians and singers, but as this collection documents, the reasons for censorship might not always be found in verbal messages. Rather, the positioning of a more broad understanding of why and how music can convey meaning and accordingly trigger censorship and bans is at the heart of this work. The complexity of music censorship includes historical, structural as well as emotional ‘listenings’ and interpretations of sound. The topic, accordingly, is political, as well as scholarly urgent.

The relationship between Romanticism and film remains one of the most neglected topics in film theory and history, with analysis often focusing on the proto-cinematic significance of Richard Wagner's music-dramas. One new and interesting way of examining this relationship is by looking beyond Wagner, and developing a concept of audio-visual explanation rooted in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, and employing it in the analysis of film discourse and representation. Using this concept of audio-visual explanation, the cultural image of the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, a contemporary of Wagner and another significant practitioner of Romantic audio-visual aesthetics, is examined in reference to specific case studies, including the rarely-explored films Song Without End (1960) and Lisztomania (1975). This multifaceted study of film discourse and representation employs Liszt as a guiding-thread, structuring a general exploration of the concept of Romanticism and its relationship with film more generally. This exploration is supported by new theories of representation based on schematic cognition, the philosophy of explanation, and the recently-developed film theory of Jacques Rancière. Individual chapters address the historical background of audio-visual explanation in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, Liszt's role in the historical discourses of film and film music, and various filmic representations of Liszt and his compositions. Throughout these investigations, Will Kitchen explores the various ways that films explain, or 'make sense' of things, through a 'Romantic' aesthetic combination of sound and vision.

Listening to music is not merely something one does, but something central to a way of living. Listening has the power to transport one into another way of being. It is a mode of feeling and forms the bedrock of deep emotion. Written from the viewpoint of a philosophy of sensibility, Matthew Del Nevo notes that this perspective may not be in fashion, but it follows a long tradition.Del Nevo emphasizes the aesthetic experience of listening to art music as it has developed and disintegrated in Western civilization. He recognizes a deep psychological element to what he calls soul—or more accurately sensibility. He addresses music in a non-technical way, taking up the powerful art theory of Charles Baudelaire, the music philosophy of Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, and takes a strong critical stand against modernist intellectual art music.The importance of this book for the musically- literate reader is its insight into the metaphysics of nostalgia. This comprehension is missing from nearly all musical instruction because we have lost sight of it. Del Nevo asserts that this understanding must be brought back into our culture. And since this is a book about listening to art music, it is no less about sensibility and its cultivation, which in its object form we call culture. An engaging book, Art Music will appeal to those interested in music, culture, and philosophy.