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Leonard Meyer proposes a theory of style and style change that relates the choices made by composers to the constraints of psychology, cultural context, and musical traditions. He explores why, out of the abundance of compositional possibilities, composers choose to replicate some patterns and neglect others. Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time. "A monumental work. . . . Most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this inte...
"Altogether it is a book that should be required reading for any student of music, be he composer, performer, or theorist. It clears the air of many confused notions . . . and lays the groundwork for exhaustive study of the basic problem of music theory and aesthetics, the relationship between pattern and meaning."—David Kraehenbuehl, Journal of Music Theory "This is the best study of its kind to have come to the attention of this reviewer."—Jules Wolffers, The Christian Science Monitor "It is not too much to say that his approach provides a basis for the meaningful discussion of emotion and meaning in all art."—David P. McAllester, American Anthropologist "A book which should be read by all who want deeper insights into music listening, performing, and composing."—Marcus G. Raskin, Chicago Review
Lays the groundwork for exhaustive study of the basic problem of music theory and aesthetics, the relationship between pattern and meaning, and provides a basis for the meaningful discussion of emotion and meaning in all art.
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In this book, the authors develop a theoretical framework based on a Gestalt approach, viewing rhythmic experience in terms of pattern perception or groupings. Musical examples of increasing complexity are used to provide training in the analysis, performance, and writing of rhythm.
In the humanities great scholars tend to be either epistemologists or metaphysicians, realists or idealists, codifiers or innovators. Leonard B. Meyer stands as an anomaly in this company, for within the realm of musicology his work is at once pragmatic and imaginative. An astonishing blend of intellectual depth and breadth, his five books and numerous essays have covered all the major fields of the discipline-not only theory, analysis, criticism, and aesthetics, but also twentieth-century culture, psychology, the nature of science versus the study of the humanities, and most recently, a refined historical theory explaining style change in the music of the nineteenth century. All of the essays in this celebratory volume reveal their affinity with and influence of Leonard Meyer's work; their widely variegated army bears witness to the catholicity of his thought and the ubiquity of its impact --From the Introduction by the editors
Leonard B. Meyers' writings on the theory, history, perception and aesthetics of music have inspired and provoked generations of readers. This volume makes available a selection of his most important essays.
Lorraine (music, U. of Tennessee at Chattanooga) suggests that analogies exist between patterns in music and in life in some cultural and historical contexts. In exploring Meyer's thinking on tendencies, inhibitions and resolutions, she provides four chapters that consist of a presentation and consideration of an aspect of his theory, and a more associative section of related thoughts. Following a discussion of Meyer's early thesis that musical expectations can give rise to meaning and effect, she addresses emotion and meaning in music, information theory, implication, and inhibition on a cultural level. c. Book News Inc.
A new theory of aesthetics and music, grounded in the collision between language and the body. In this book, Tim Hodgkinson proposes a theory of aesthetics and music grounded in the boundary between nature and culture within the human being. His analysis discards the conventional idea of the human being as an integrated whole in favor of a rich and complex field in which incompatible kinds of information—biological and cultural—collide. It is only when we acknowledge the clash of body and language within human identity that we can understand how art brings forth the special form of subjectivity potentially present in aesthetic experiences. As a young musician, Hodgkinson realized that mu...
This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.