Music has not been as prominent in philosophy or as influential in aesthetics as the visual arts, at least in the Western tradition. Reflecting on my years of experience as both a philosopher and a musician, I am increasingly intrigued by speculating if and how today’s aesthetic discourse might have taken a different direction if music been its c…[Read more]

Review of Biagio Marini: Madrigali et Symfonie, ed. Aurelio Bianco and Sara Dieci. pp. 217. Épitome Musical. (Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, 2014).

Review of Aurelio Bianco, ‘Nach englischer und frantzösischer Art’: Vie et oeuvre de Carlo Farina (avec l’édition des cinq recueils de Dresde) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).

Discusses the idea of “translation” and applies it to the flexibility of performance in early music.

Review of a CD of string music by Paul Ben-Haim. Touches on issues of identity, diaspora, and reception.

Several points of intersection exist between vocal and instrumental music by Italian composers of the early seventeenth century. First, like books of vocal monody with an overt pedagogical purpose, volumes of instrumental music may have been designed to instruct the performer in the conventions of the modern style. Specifically, many books…[Read more]

Connections between Johann Jacob Froberger’s harpsichord laments and other genres of keyboard and lute music (the unmeasured prelude, the tombeau and some allemandes) are by now well known. However, the ‘Méditation faite sur ma mort future’ (Meditation made on my future death), stands out for its connection-overlooked until now-with the French…[Read more]

Discusses the Capriccio stravagante by the Italian violin virtuoso Carlo Farina, as court Konzertmeister at the court of Saxony in Dresden. Suggests that the model for the Capriccio may be found in the many collections at the Dresden court and in the early modern strategies of learning, knowing and experiencing the world through the act of…[Read more]

In entitling his debut publication of 1617 Affetti musicali, Biagio Marini became the first composer to use the suggestive term affetti in the title of a book consisting entirely of instrumental music. Marini indicated that the book grew out of live music-making among a progressive group of Venetian listeners. Consideration of these social musical…[Read more]

A section of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s Magia naturalis (1589) celebrates the powers of musical instruments. Most of these powers are rooted in neo-Platonist natural magic: Della Porta explains that the materials of instruments retain their original properties, shaping the body and soul of the listener through their mutual sympathy or a…[Read more]

An essay is presented which explores the work with the exlibris of Zippora Wulff which survives in the collection of the Sing- Akademie: the Wechselgesang der Miijam und Debora by Justin Heinrich Knecht. It mentions that the relationship between ancient poetry and modern music. It mentions that Messias had already been held up by both Jewish and…[Read more]

Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle’s treatise La tonotechnie, ou l’art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music’s mouvement – its temporal flexibi…[Read more]

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers
frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations
they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description
and musical…[Read more]

This essay considers the powerful influence of dualistic thinking in aesthetics and the capacity of aesthetics to transcend and heal that division. I locate the origins of this influence in a distinctively Western cultural tradition that begins in classical Greek philosophy, especially in Plato, is carried forward in early modern philosophy and…[Read more]

Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic broadening in the scope of aesthetic inquiry. No longer focused exclusively on the arts and natural beauty, the mainstream of aesthetics has entered a delta in which its flow has spread out into many channels before entering the ocean of civilization. Several decades ago, environmental aesthetics began to…[Read more]

Given at a symposium on environmental aesthetics in China and the West.

Environmental concerns have a global scope, yet different cultural traditions, philosophical cultures, and conditions of life influence the way we understand experience and environment. A similar understanding of the central ideas is needed for cooperative action on environmental issues to be effective. The first part of this essay is conceptual…[Read more]

Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. Traditional accounts are inadequate to identify and illuminate…[Read more]