This introduction to the aesthetics and sociology of music of the German philosopher and music theorist T. W. Adorno is the only book to deal comprehensively with this topic and it has quickly established itself as a classic text.

Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens (...) up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

By the author of Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. This book consists of four sections: critical theory and music; Adorno's aesthetics of modernism; Adorno, popular music and mass culture; and critical reflections on Adorno.

This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The book offers a wide range of international perspectives from prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers.Part I is mainly theoretical in emphasis. Issues addressed include the historical rationalization of music and technology, new approaches to the theorization of atonal harmony in the wake of Spectralism, debates on the 'new complexity', the heterogeneity, (...) pluralism and stylistic omnivorousness that characterizes music in our time, and the characterization of twentieth-century and contemporary music as a 'search for lost harmony'. The orientation of Part II is mainly philosophical, examining concepts of totality and inclusivity in new music. Part III offers creative perspectives, with new essays and interviews from important contemporary composers. A concluding essay by Alastair Williams provides a postlude to the book, while the whole collection is prefaced by an extended introductory chapter by Max Paddison which provides a context of ideas, and traces many of the issues discussed back to Adorno's seminal notion of une musique informelle. (shrink)

Adornos Kritik der populären Musik gilt als der Teil seiner ansonsten so beeindruckenden Analyse des Dilemmas der westlichen Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, der am wenigsten überzeugt. Warum seine Sicht der populären Musik nur schwer zu akzeptieren ist, scheint auf der Hand zu liegen; und es lässt sich nicht leugnen, dass die gängige Kritik, Adorno sei auf diesem Gebiet voreingenommen, arrogant und uninformiert gewesen, mehr als nur ein Fünkchen Wahrheit enthält. Ich habe jedoch nicht die Absicht, den üblichen Beschimpfungen weitere hinzuzufügen (...) oder Adornos Grundthese zum Dilemma der Kultur des 20. Jahrhunderts als Ganze anzugreifen. (shrink)