An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music’s ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.

"From 1958 to 1978 in New York a series of atmospheric irruptions emerged in the history of music, fraught with dissonance, obscurity, and volume. Beyond expanding musical resources into dissonance and noise with a familiar polemical edge, a group of musicians were thinking with sound: crafting metaphysical portals, aiming one to go somewhere, to get out of oneself. For many artists and thinkers of the postwar period, the self was taken to be ideological, given, normal. Their strange, intense, disorienting music was a way out, beyond, through the other, through the collective, through an ecstatic mystery. Their work had material underpinnings: radios, amplifiers, televisions, multi-track recording studios, and long-playing records. Some of the results were intricate, esoteric, and fractured; some of it oceanic and inconsistent. It was often difficult to tell the difference. In this new project, Michael Gallope discusses the work of several musicians who played key roles in these musical irruptions: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, and Richard Hell and Patti Smith. Their work involved a larger group of collaborators, some of them among the mid-twentieth century's most celebrated artists and musicians: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and John Coltrane. This project is a history of the thinking embedded in their collective work, and it is a critical exposition of this period of time. Gallope details how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music's ineffability. He contends that the musicians at the center of each chapter-all of whom are understudied, and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers-not only challenged the rules by which music was written and practiced, but also confounded gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social process of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self"--

Deep Refrains is a wide-ranging investigation of the philosophy of music. Michael Gallope asks what it means for music to "speak” when it is not saying anything in particular. To answer this question, he turns to the writings of some of the most revered thinkers of the twentieth century--Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jank�l�vitch, Gilles Deleuze, and F�lix Guattari. For these theorists, Gallope argues, the paradox that music is both ineffable and yet harbors deep philosophical wisdoms is fertile ground for thinking outside of conceptual boundaries. It provides the lens for a utopian potentiality that inspires hope (Bloch), an ethical critique of modernity (Adorno), an exemplification of the ephemeral movement of lived time (Jank�l�vitch), and a sonic extension of the syncopated, contrapuntal rhythms of sense and social life (Deleuze and Guattari). Gallope argues that a philosophical engagement with music’s ineffability rarely calls for silence or declarations of the unspeakable. Rather, it asks us to think through the ways in which the impact of music is made to address complex philosophical problems specific to the modern world.

Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique.

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia—three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man’s perceptions—and the course of Western history. In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia’s chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna—the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli’s frequent dispatches and Leonardo’s meticulous notebooks. Superbly written and thoroughly researched, The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior is a work of narrative genius—whose subject is the nature of genius itself.

Grammy Award winner Victor Wooten's inspiring parable of the importance of music and the threats that it faces in today's world. We may not realize it as we listen to the soundtrack of our lives through tiny earbuds, but music and all that it encompasses is disappearing all around us. In this fable-like story three musicians from around the world are mysteriously summoned to Nashville, the Music City, to join together with Victor to do battle against the "Phasers," whose blinking "music-cancelling" headphones silence and destroy all musical sound. Only by coming together, connecting, and making the joyful sounds of immediate, "live" music can the world be restored to the power and spirit of music. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

The author constructs a new concept of music education, one designed to stimulate, guide, and support the efforts of pre-service and practicing music teachers as they tackle the many theoretical and practical issues involved in music education. He provides rigorous reflections on the "why, what, and how" of music teaching and learning that serve as catalysts for critical thinking and individual-philosophy building.

This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the importance of music for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and work. Wittgenstein’s remarks on music are essential for understanding his philosophy: they are on the nature of musical understanding, the relation of music to language, the concepts of representation and expression, on melody, irony and aspect-perception, and, on the great composers belonging to the Austrian-German tradition. Biography and philosophy, this work suggests that Wittgenstein was a composer of philosophy who used the musical form as a blueprint for his own writing and thought. For Wittgenstein music is not alone, but connects and resonates with our cultural forms of life. His relation to composers, especially to Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, enables Wittgenstein to address the question of how to do philosophy and compose music in the breakdown of tradition. Unlike his conservative musical sensibility, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is open to musical experiments. Reflecting on his remarks on music makes it possible to compare the therapeutic aim of his philosophical activity with that of music, and thus notice affinities between Wittgenstein and John Cage. Béla Szabados has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Calgary and is professor of philosophy at the University of Regina. His publications include Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (2004), Wittgenstein at the Movies (2011) and Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as a Personal Endeavour (2010).

Col. Bruce Hampton was a charismatic musical figure who launched and continued to influence the jam band genre over his fifty-plus years performing. Part bandleader, soul singer, storyteller, conjuror, poet, preacher, comedian, philosopher, and trickster, Col. Bruce actively sought out and dealt in the weird, wild underbelly of the American South. The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton is neither a true biography in the Boswellian sense nor a work of cultural studies, although it combines elements of both. Even as biographer Jerry Grillo has investigated and pursued the facts, this life history of Col. Bruce reads like a novel—one full of amazing tales of a musical life lived on and off the road. Grillo’s interviews with Hampton and his bandmates, family, friends, and fans paint a fascinating portrait of an artist who fostered some of the best music ever played in America. Grillo aims not so much to document and demystify the self-mythologizing performer as to explain why his fans and friends loved him so dearly. Hampton’s family history, his place in Atlanta and southeastern musical history, his significant friendships and musical relationships, and the controversies over personnel in his Hampton Grease Band over the years are all discussed. What emerges is a portrait of a P. T. Barnum of the musical world, but one who included his audience and invited them through the tent door to share his inside joke, with plenty of joy to go around.

Argues that for the first time in history we're in a position to end extreme poverty throughout the world, both because of our unprecedented wealth and advances in technology, therefore we can no longer consider ourselves good people unless we give more to the poor. Reprint.