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  3. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning
  • Cited by 80
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      September 2009
      November 1999
      ISBN:
      9780511481697
      9780521631815
      9780521027519
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511481697
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.575kg, 328 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.496kg, 328 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Music, Music Criticism, Music Performance
      Series:
      New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (4)
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    • Selected: Digital
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    Subjects:
    Music, Music Criticism, Music Performance
    Series:
    New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (4)
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    Book description

    This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'.

    Reviews

    ‘… has been explored by other writers before Chua, but he gives it an extra twist by setting it in the larger and longer story of Western civilisation’s ‘disenchantment’.’

    Source: BBC Music Magazine

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