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Available
from
Amazon.com, CreateSpace and other Amazon online bookstores
worldwide (e.g. at amazon.de as a
paperback)
under the title Thinking of Music: An approach along a parallel path
CreateSpace 2015 130 pp. ISBN 978-1514840023. The book is a revised, emended, extended edition of my The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music.
About the book
Today's composers are preoccupied first and
foremost with exploring the possibilities of producing new and hitherto unheard-of kinds of
different-sounding music. In particular, they employ advanced, mainly electronic, technologies, or
invent new musical instruments that break the mould of traditional music-making, thus introducing
new sounds to music. On this front there are exciting, creative developments for those willing to open
their ears. These contemporary composers also often take a piece of literature, an art work, a
landscape or an historical event for extraneous orientation. The traditional understanding of music,
especially of Western music, based as it is on harmony and wedded to aesthetic theory, has long since
been burst. The beginning of the twentieth century heralded already a break-out into the realm of sounds
beyond those well-defined, pure, rational tones produced by specially designed instruments. The advent
of electricity and electronics exploded conceptions of music tied to venerated traditions, particularly in
European music. Do these new kinds of music come about simply because of advances in technology
that composers and musicians licentiously and creatively appropriate for their own music-making
purposes? Or does their thinking need to dig deeper philosophically to gain another orientation and
attunement?
There is a dearth of philosophical thinking on music nowadays, which invariably remains dedicated
either to aesthetic theory or social critique, or to a blend of both. The present study offers an alternative
approach to thinking on music along a path that leads from... via... to music and is parallel to the way
from... via... to language.
The author
For information on the author, please look up
Michael
Eldred at Amazon.
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