DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

A Language of Its Own

Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music

Ruth Katz author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:13th Sep '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A Language of Its Own cover

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous - and enormously influential-dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensable relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. As ideas entered music from the contexts out of which it arose, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of this frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.

"This book is the crowning achievement of a first-rate scholar, drawing on decades of intensive as well as extensive expertise. The perspective it offers on Western art music is not just exceptionally well informed but also thoroughly original. Scholars in generations to come will find it an invaluable document of how scholars working at the end of the Western canonic paradigm viewed that paradigm." (Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University)"

ISBN: 9780226425979

Dimensions: 23mm x 16mm x 2mm

Weight: 567g

242 pages