Event of Music History

This book offers a new theory of how to write music history, bringing musicology to the cutting edge of debates in postmodern philosophy of history. It proposes a focus on the subjects of history, the faithful, reactive, and obscure responses to an event, and sees musical materials in a dialectical relationship with the human beings who are music's manifold historical actors.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 264 pages
\n Publication date: 26 March 2021
\n Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
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This book presents a groundbreaking new theory of how to write music history, offering an exemplar of this theory in a series of four chapter-length reflexions on Beethoven's heroic style. The first book-length theory of music history since Carl Dahlhaus's Foundations of Music History, it brings musicology to the cutting edge of debates in the postmodern philosophy of history. While engaging with current thinking, the book goes beyond the postmodern critique of history writing to find a new and positive basis for the writing of music history. In doing so, it revisits the philosophy of Alain Badiou, shifting the focus from the facts to the subjects of history—the faithful, reactive, and obscure responses to an event (a kind of rapture of ontology that brings the actors involved closer to a truth). It sees musical materials (the styles, techniques, and musical language handed down to composers by history) in a dialectical relationship with the human beings who are music's manifold historical actors. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this new short theory of music history will be essential reading for scholars and students of the many area studies within music history. It will also attract those of neighboring disciplines dealing with the philosophy of history or the history of historiography.

\n Weight: 330g\n
Dimension: 138 x 215 x 17 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781783275991\n \n