Music In Search Of Itself: Essays On Music About Music

Description

Many contemporary composers and music critics say in an offhand way that all music written in the past quarter century is about music - that it is reflexive and self-referential in some significant sense. It is music in search of an understanding of itself. This book tries to deepen the understanding of music about music as well as music itself in four ways. First, it puts music's own self-understanding onto an equal footing with philosophical aesthetics of music. It subjects pieces of music about music to close, detailed analysis, and puts the statements about the nature of music that emerge from these analyses into conversation with philosophical statements about music. Second, it investigates whether and in what way the concept of reflexive music makes sense and to what extent music about music is possible. Third, it inquires into the need for music to search for itself, and evaluates the connection between this need and the European fascination and then disillusion with the concept of aesthetic experience. Fourth, it brings to the surface a sense, embedded in music's self-understanding, that there are severe limits to the meaningfulness of music in general that it is thus impossible for music about music to be fully meaningful.