Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain

ISBN-13: 9781138278912 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 196 str.

Maria Semi; Translated By Timothy Keates

Opis

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. A particularly rich field of investigation, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'.

Recenzje

'I recommend this book to a wide audience... absolutely engrossing and satisfying.' Early Music America 'Two significant questions posed by Semi’s new book are, to what extent does speculation on music enter into this scientific discourse, and in what way does the art of music itself participate in and contribute to the overall project? These are important but underexplored issues, one reason being that, for the most part, historians of eighteenth-century British science and philosophy have not considered music as part of their intellectual remit. In my view, this book certainly shows that they should.' British Journal for the History of Science '... an interesting and welcome synthesis of British eighteenth century theories of music.' Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Spis treści

Introduction; Part I The contribution of music to the ‘Science of Man’; Chapter 1 An ethical pleasure? Music and the education of man; Chapter 2 Anthropologies and psychologies of listening; Part II An intellectual background for British musical theories and histories; Chapter 3 Musical knowledge and human knowledge; Chapter 4 Music and history;

O autorze

Maria Semi was educated at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she took a PhD in Musicology. After a year spent as Research Fellow at the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France), she is currently Research Fellow back at the University of Bologna. Her principal interests concern the philosophy of music from ancient times to the eighteenth century, the organization of musical knowledge in the same period, and the role played by music in cultural and social contexts. She is currently working on a new French critical edition of Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique.