As illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. Elective Affinities tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War.
What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer such questions, Lydia Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. Finding Anglo-American philosophy inadequate for the task, she shows that a historical perspective is indispensable to a full understanding of musical ontology. Goehr examines the concepts and assumptions behind the practice of classical music in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how different they were from those of previous centuries. She rejects the finding that the concept of a musical work emerged in the sixteenth century, placing its emergence instead around 1800. She describes how the concept of a work then came to define the norms, expectations, and behaviour that we now associate with classical music. Out of the historical thesis Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates among conductors, early music performers, and avant-gardists. - ;Introduction; I. The Analytic Approach: Status and identity: Analytical positions I; Analytical positions II; Critique and transition; II. The Historical Approach: Normativity and Practice: The central claim; Musical meaning I; Musical meaning II; Musical production I; Musical production II; Werktreue: Confirmation and challenge -
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?
Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses some fundamental questions of German Romanticism: Is all music musical? Is music made less musical by the presence of words? What is musical autonomy? How do composers avoid censorship? How are composers affected by exile? Can music articulate a 'politics for the future'? What is the relation between music and philosophy?
Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses some fundamental questions of German Romanticism: Is all music musical? Is music made less musical by the presence of words? What is musical autonomy? How do composers avoid censorship? How are composers affected by exile? Can music articulate a 'politics for the future'? What is the relation between music and philosophy?
As illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. Elective Affinities tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War.
What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer such questions, Lydia Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. Finding Anglo-American philosophy inadequate for the task, she shows that a historical perspective is indispensable to a full understanding of musical ontology. Goehr examines the concepts and assumptions behind the practice of classical music in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how different they were from those of previous centuries. She rejects the finding that the concept of a musical work emerged in the sixteenth century, placing its emergence instead around 1800. She describes how the concept of a work then came to define the norms, expectations, and behaviour that we now associate with classical music. Out of the historical thesis Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates among conductors, early music performers, and avant-gardists. - ;Introduction; I. The Analytic Approach: Status and identity: Analytical positions I; Analytical positions II; Critique and transition; II. The Historical Approach: Normativity and Practice: The central claim; Musical meaning I; Musical meaning II; Musical production I; Musical production II; Werktreue: Confirmation and challenge -
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? The book explores narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?
Hegel is known as "the father of art history," yet recent scholarship has overlooked his contributions. This is the first comprehensive interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of art in English in thirty years. In a new analysis of Hegel's notorious "end of art" thesis, Hegel's Aesthetics shows the indispensability of Hegel's aesthetics for understanding his philosophical idealism and introduces a new claim about his account of aesthetic experience. In a departure from previous interpretations, Lydia Moland argues for considering Hegel's discussion of individual arts--architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry--on their own terms, unlocking new insights about his theories of perception, feeling, selfhood, and freedom. This new approach allows Hegel's philosophy to engage with modern aesthetic theories and opens new possibilities for applying Hegel's aesthetics to contemporary art. Moland further elucidates his controversial analysis of symbolic, classical, and romantic art through clarifying Hegel's examples of each. By incorporating newly available sources from Hegel's lectures on art, this book widely expands our understanding of the particular artworks Hegel discusses as well as the theories he rejects. Hegel's Aesthetics further situates his arguments in the intense philosophizing about art among his contemporaries, including Kant, Lessing, Herder, Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers. Ultimately, the book offers a rich vision of the foundation of his ideas about art and the range of their application, confirming Hegel as one of the most important theorists of art in the history of philosophy.
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