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. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and humanist (...) discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

The Don Giovanni Moment is the first book to examine the aesthetic and moral legacy of Mozart's masterpiece in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the nineteenth century.

This essay is written as an introductory essay to celebrate the third edition of Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History, first printed in 1965. It raises questions about what it means to write an introduction given Danto’s own philosophical theses on history. What does it mean to write before a book but after the fact? The essay also pays special attention to the connections between Danto’s philosophy of history, philosophy of art, and the other areas of his philosophy that he (...) regards to be all of a piece. It considers the nature of analytical philosophy and its heyday in America in the postwar period, when, to some degree, it was used as an antidote to a ideology of history that had proved itself to be no more than an extreme perversion of some of the most influential claims in a philosophy of history developed in Germany around 1800. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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?

This essay is about ekphrasis and the possibility of musical ekphrasis in particular. It shows how ekphrasis came to be bound up with the contest of the arts. By juxtaposing an ancient, description-based view of ekphrasis with a modern work-to-work view, we are led to see the many productive ways in which ekphrasis has engaged the arts, including music, without assuming hard and fast distinctions of medium between the different arts.

1 Il primo inganno Tu non nascesti per la morte, immortale Uccello!le affannate generazioni non ti calpestano;la voce ch’io odo in questa fuggevole notte fu uditain antichi giorni dall’imperatore e dal villano. Questi versi dall’ Ode a un usignolo di John Keats, del 1819, ripropongono la domanda retorica che già Kant aveva posto nel 1790: «Che cosa c’è di più celebrato dai poeti dell’affascinante bel canto dell’usignolo, in cespugli solitari, in una calma sera d’estate, sotto la dolce luce de...

"This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today's leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike"--.

Verschillende personnages uit de Meistersinger worden getoetst aan wat Goehr de "esthetiek der ontkenning" noemt, waarbij ook de interpretatie van verschillende musicologen wordt behandeld.

This chapter contains sections titled: Reading Art Other Pictures The Commonplace Transfiguration Reading Prints Ekphrasis Moving Past The Vulgar Re‐evaluating Values Paragone Exemplary Marsyas Image–Word–Sound Saints and Painters Refiguring Error.

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? (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 111-114, Winter 2020.

Influenced by methodological trends in contemporary cultural history, recent writings in music history now share a common and very basic concern: to reconcile the desire to treat musical works as purely musical entities with value and significance of their own with the desire to account for the fact that such works are conditioned by the historical, social, and psychological contexts in which they are produced. This essay places these modern reconciliations within a broader discussion of the uneasy relations that hold (...) between the domains of the musical and the extra-musical. It shows how both the logic and the history of this relationship has reflected the need to establish borders of the musical domain, and, following upon that, criteria of relevance for determining what is and what is not to be included in the writing of music history. (shrink)

Este ensayo investiga el discurso global a la sombra de la década de 1960. Se basa en los puntos de vista de Nelson Goodman, Marshall McLuhan y Theodor W. Adorno para explorar tres conceptos centrales para la música en la época de la transmisión global: concordancia, corriente y virtualidad.

(No abstract is available for this citation).