This collection of essays addresses technical developments in telecommunications and sound recording that have guided the direction of musical aesthetics in the post-1950 era. Such information is readily available online but may appear counterintuitive to many who find its priorities difficult to grasp from a musical perspective. The author hopes to draw attention to the place of ideas of communication and flight in western tradition. This Element begins with Varèse and his 'noble noise', traverses the arrival of Information Theory and its influence, examples of early computer music, and ends with a defence of the sublime logic of Stockhausen's singing helicopters and tornados.

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.

This book is a radical attempt to explain musical meaning as the complex fabric of tension and relaxation resulting from the courses of the individual musical elements: e.g. rhythm, where the musical tension manifests itself by the opposition between strong and weak beats - or harmony, where the chords of the tonal cadence generate courses of tension and relaxation. It is strongly emphasized that the total structure of contributors to the web of tension/relaxation, in short, the musical style, is constantly changing, and it is an error to believe that any musical way of articulation is eternal: new ways of expression arrive and others drop out gradually - precisely as with ordinary language. This consideration, however, implies that too many and radical changes over a short period of time are foredoomed to go over the head of the ordinary listener. The radical modernism of the 1950s illustrates how composers in their endeavour to wipe the slate clean in order to start from scratch largely failed. Attempts at semantic interpretations of music are rejected. Such interpretations belong to the private sphere and cannot be scholarly supported. No hermeneutic interpretation, however elaborate, can claim higher truth value than another.

Staging a fruitful dialogue between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions, while reflecting specifically on the work of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Serres and Nancy, Lueck offers a creative new approach to the problem of moral obligation. Lueck builds on Immanuel Kant's fact of reason - the idea that being a moral subject necessarily presupposes ones having accepted the bindingness of obligation - to show that it must be rethought as the fact of sense.

Basing his work on conversations with the composer, Karl Wörner puts into plain language the ideas behind Stockhausen's new musical forms, examines the development of electronic music and explains the spatial location in new music; the broader aspects of the composer's place in musical history and in the society in which he works are also considered. Particularly valuable is the section on Stockhausen's life, his friends and pupils; and the book includes the composer's own notes on his works. -- from back cover.

The Differentiation of Modernism analyzes the phenomenon of intermediality in German radio plays, film music, and electronic music of the late modernist period (1945-1980). After 1945, the purist "medium specificity" of high modernism increasingly yielded to the mixed forms of intermediality. Theodor Adorno dubbed this development a "Verfransung," or "fraying of boundaries," between the arts. TheDifferentiation of Modernism analyzes this phenomenon in German electronic media arts of the late modernist period (1945-80): in radio plays, film music, and electronic music. The first part of the book begins with a chapter on Adorno's theory of radio as an instrument of democratization, going on to analyze the relationship of the Hörspiel or radio play to electronic music. In the second part, on film music, a chapter on Adorno and Eisler's Composing for the Film sets the parameters for chapters on the film Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1957) and on the music films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The third part examines the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and its relationship to radio, abstract painting, recording technology, and theatrical happenings. The book's central notion of the "differentiation of culture" suggests that late modernism, unlike high modernism, accepted the contingency of modern mass-media driven society and sought to find new forms for it. Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature (Camden House, 2008).

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The Devil and the Perception of Schnittke's Early Style -- The Mythologems in Schnittke's First Symphony -- Postlude -- Appendix 1. An interview with George Crumb -- Appendix 2. The English translation of the texts by García Lorca from George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children -- Appendix 3. Text excerpts from Stockhausen's Licht -- Selected bibliography -- List of Illustrations -- Index