Citation Information
Article Title: Music
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 11 June 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/art/music
Access Date: August 27, 2019
Additional Reading Modern theories of musical meaning
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1883; Eng. trans., The World as Will and Idea, 1961); and Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” trans. by Clifton P. Fadiman in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (1954), are two important expositions. Eduard Hanslick, Vom musikalisch Schönen (1854; Eng. trans., The Beautiful in Music, 1957), remains the best single exposition of the formalist (or nonreferentialist) position in musical aesthetics. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (1880, reprinted 1966), maintains a similar point of view but with considerably greater amplitude and subtlety. For background of the contemporary symbolist views of musical meaning, see Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism (1959); Susanne K. Langer, “On Significance in Music,” in Philosophy in a New Key, 2nd ed. (1951), and Feeling and Form (1953). Leonard B. Meyer has made an important contribution to the aesthetics of music. His interest in the relevance of information theory to music has been evidenced in two articles: “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 14:412–424 (1957), and “Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music,” ibid., 17:486–500 (1959), reprinted in his Music, The Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (1967). John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934, reprinted 1959); and Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (1947; Eng. trans., Truth and Symbol, 1959), have given reinforcement to organic and symbolic theses, respectively. Peter Le Huray and James Day (eds.), Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (1981), expounds theories of musical aesthetics from the pre- and early-Romantic period. Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell (1981), is a study of the emotional expressivity of music. Performance practice, styles, and musical forms
The best historical accounts of musical forms, styles, and performance practice are to be found in Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music (1960); Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (1940), and Music in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (1959); Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (1947); Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (1947); and William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century, from Debussy to Stravinsky (1966). Sir Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music (1956), contains informative and engaging short pieces. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. by Konrad Wolff (Eng. trans. 1947), is an example of the work by a 19th-century precursor of the phenomenon of the present-day composer-authors who have contributed to aesthetic theory by elucidating their own works and commentating on other composers and on the scene in general. See also Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1947); Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World (1952); Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination (1952). Discussion of music and film may be found in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Emergence of Film Art (1969). Twelve-tone technique and varieties of serialism deriving from it are treated in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (1950); and René Leibowitz, Schoenberg, et son école (1947; Eng. trans., Schoenberg and His School, 1949). Short pieces on electronic music appear often in periodical literature. Harold C. Schonberg, Facing the Music (1981), is a collection of performance-oriented articles. See also Carol MacClintock (ed.), Readings in the History of Music in Performance (1979).