Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music (original) (raw)
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The difficulty of capturing or deciphering music in words is largely why the same questions continue to be asked and the same tensions continue to be explored. Contributors to this special issue add fresh perspectives and new insights to these enduring themes and inquiries, looking at music in both the general sense and examining specific musical pieces, movements, and moments. Each article has its own focus, makes its own arguments, and occupies its own branch(es) of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, and, of course, aesthetics. Beyond the centralizing subject of music, what ties them together and into the best of philosophical traditions is that they not only ask big questions but also, in seeking to answer them, add more questions to the ongoing discourse.
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From Debussy to this early 21st century, sound has become one of the major wagers of music. Music had begun a change of paradigm, going from a culture centred on the note to a culture of sound. It could be wagered that this radical change is at least as founding as the revolution that gave birth to tonality. The emergence of sound in music happened through six parallel histories: timbre, which became a central category of composition; noise and the exploration of its musical potential; listening, with awareness having opened up to sound in itself; the increasingly intensive immersion in sound; the substitution of the composition of sound for composition with sounds; and space, which is increasingly thought of as ‘composable’. It is in crossing, combining and converging that these histories have ended up provoking this paradigmatical change. The book proposes a synthesis, one of the first of its kind, since its ambition is to delimit the emergence of sound systematically and globally. It sometimes refers to little-known or unknown musical works next to others more frequently mentioned by musicologists and music lovers. It also seeks a balance between sections comprising analytical developments and others of a more synthetic nature – it hopes to address the general public and specialists alike.