What is involved in the composition, performance, and reception of classical music? What are we doing when we listen to this music seriously? Why when playing a Beethoven sonata do performers begin with the first note indicated in the score; why don't they feel free to improvise around the sonata's central theme? Why, finally, does it go against tradition for an audience at a concert of classical music to tap its feet? Bound up in these questions is the overriding question of what it means philosophically, musically, and historically for musicians to speak about music in terms of "works". In this book, Lydia Goehr describes how the concept of a musical work fully crystallized around 1800, and subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavioral patterns that have come to characterize classical musical practice. The description is set in the context of a more general philosophical account of the rise and fall of concepts and ideals, and of their normative functions; at the same time, debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists are addressed. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works is a seminal work of scholarship, and has appeared in an astonishing variety of contexts and disciplines from musicological and philosophical since its initial publication. This second edition features a new Introductory Essay by the author, discussing the genesis of her groundbreaking thesis, how her subsequent work has followed and developed similar themes, and how criticisms along the way have informed not only her own work but the "Imaginary Museum" concept more generally as it spread across disciplinary lines. A provocative foreword by Richard Taruskin contextualizes Goehr's argument and points to its continuing centrality to the field.

The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music

Arts & Photography

Goehr, Lydia

Music

Oxford University Press

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?

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story

Politics & Social Sciences

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?

The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy : The 1997 Ernest Bloch Lectures

History

Oxford Univ. Pr.

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?

The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy: The 1997 Ernest Bloch Lectures

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 this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists.

Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

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.

Columbia University Press

What is musical meaning? Where does it reside and how can it be known? Does it make a difference to its meaning if the music is composed with or without words, as a symphony or a song? Why is it claimed that music can express human feelings with an immediacy not possible in other languages or arts? What is contained in the claim that music is autonomous, or that it is prophetic and can articulate a 'politics for the future'? Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses these classic questions of German Romanticism. On the way, she offers an account of the peculiar relation that was established between philosophy and music in the nineteenth century; a philosophical and political reading of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger; an account of the Wagner-Hanslick debate on musical formalism; an argument for resituating musical autonomy in the spirit of Wagner's Gesamtkuntswerk; an account of the competing performance ideals embodied in Wagner's Bayreuth; and an interpretation of Wagner's legacy as experienced by composers exiled from Nazi Germany. Goehr's historical and musicological enquiries are unified by a philosophical study of the impact of a transcendental or critical perspective on philosophical theory. She argues that philosophy needs to take its limits seriously to accommodate the primacy of music's practice.

The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Ernest Bloch Lectures)

University of California Press

David Lean's extraordinary films work philosophically through the modern reproductive and transportive technologies of sight and sound: through trains, planes, ships, and automobiles, from one perspective, and through the modern technology of the radio and gramophone, from another.\nLean's musical motifs are known worldwide: Lara's theme in Zhivago; the Colonel Bogey March in Kwai; Estella's motif in Great Expectations; Rosy's motif in Ryan's Daughter; Lawrence's motif for his adventure in Arabia, and of course Rachmaninoff's pounding chords in Brief Encounter. When, however, Lean described his cutting of pictures as akin to how music flows through pictures, what sort of music or musicality had he in mind: a classical or popular music, or a way of using musical form to mix up the meaning and material of his films?\nLydia Goehr's new book tracks the soundscape in Lean's films not only through the musical scores composed for the films, but also, and more, through the technology of radio and gramophone that, at the start of Lean's career, were becoming indispensable household items for the home. The book begins and ends with a motif running from the early more domestic films locally situated in the English home to the later more extensive epics of colony, commonwealth, and empire. The fidelity-infidelity relationship defined by marriage extends to the loyalty-betrayal relationship regarding countries of war and peace-after which this relationship is extended to the witty British manner of making film as a perfected and not so perfected symphonic work of a great cutter's art. Here, as few other books on Lean have emphasized, the influence of Noel Coward on Lean cannot be overestimated.

David Lean: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Philosophical Filmmakers)

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Bloomsbury Academic

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goehr, Lydia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Goehr, Lydia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goehr, Lydia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story

The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy : The 1997 Ernest Bloch Lectures

The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy: The 1997 Ernest Bloch Lectures

The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music

The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music

Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Ernest Bloch Lectures)

David Lean: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Philosophical Filmmakers)