Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism, Series Number 4)

This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'. Frontmatter List of illustrations (page ix) Acknowledgements (page x) On the preface (page xi) Part 1 The Garden of Eden 1 On history (page 3) 2 On modernity (page 8) 3 On disenchantment (page 12) 4 On division (page 23) 5 On opera (page 29) 6 On machines (page 41) 7 On space (page 51) On style (page 61) Part 2 The Fruit of Knowledge 9 On being (page 75) 10 On the mind (page 82) 11 On biology (page 92) 12 On the body (page 98) 13 On the soul (page 105) 14 On morality (page 114) 15 On women (page 126) 16 On masculinity (page 136) 17 On independence (page 145) 18 On heroes (page 150) 19 On politics (page 162) 20 On nothing (page 167) 21 On God (page 171) 22 On infinity (page 177) 23 On self-deification (page 183) 24 On invisibility (page 191) 25 On conscious life-forms (page 199) 26 On artificiality (page 209) Part 3 The Tower of Babel 27 On death (page 221) 28 On absolute music (page 224) 29 On the beautiful and the sublime (page 228) 30 On monuments (page 235) 31 On the apocalypse (page 245) 32 On the end (page 257) 33 On suicide (page 266) 34 On absolute drivel (page 276) 35 On Babel (page 287) Bibliography (page 291) Index (page 307) "This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to empty its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against the notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music is, but why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. Instead of existing in a pure and autonomous form, music is woven back into the epistemological fabric, and tangled with the discourses of theology, visual perspective, biology, philosophy, gender, chemistry, politics, physics. Such contextualisation, far from diminishing the significance of music, actually demonstrates the centrality of music in the construction of modernity From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodor Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'."--Jacket

This book examines the intellectual history of instrumental music and its power to construct meaning.