This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.

This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.

This book contains six chapters covering key areas of musical aesthetics, including aesthetics of emotions; aesthetics of listening; aesthetics of performance; aesthetics of composition; aesthetics of nature; and aesthetics of commerce. Each chapter adopts an experiential approach to aesthetics, in which perceptual and intuitive musical responses – real-time experiences – are valued as a source of truth. Unlike intellectual aesthetics, which values conscious associations and meticulous artistic appraisals, experiential aesthetics looks primarily at everyday subconscious appreciations. The explorations here draw from the social sciences, hard sciences, philosophy, literature, theology, musicology, humanities, and other fields that directly or indirectly contribute to an understanding of our attraction to music. Presenting user-friendly distillations of numerous theories, concepts, and functions, this book will be of interest to both lay readers and expert practitioners.

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.

Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course the eighteenth century. This book addresses that gap, elaborating the extent to which artworks and practices of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were accompanied by an immense range of discussions about the arts and their relation to one another. Rather than take art as a stand-in for or reflection of some other historical event or social phenomenon, this book treats art as a phenomenon in itself. The contributors suggest ways in which artworks and practices of the early modern period make aesthetic experience central to philosophical reflection, while also showing art’s need for philosophy.

Explanation and critical examination of many theories in the philosophy and theory of music. Moral significance of music, its place in our culture, the need for taste and discrimination in both performer and listener.