-Music is no mere play of sound, no mere tonal texture, but has a significant psychic, spiritual/intellectual and social dimension. In other words: a musical art work is not merely an autonomous artifact but also document humain.- With this thesis and with a view to the question as to the meaning of music as such the author opens his broadly designed plea for a -humane music.- Based on interdisciplinary researches, and making use of partly unfamiliar documents, he demonstrates on musical works from Monteverdi to Alban Berg how and why they can be heard and understood as a tonal language...

While unappreciated and controversial during most of his life, Anton Bruckner is today regarded as the greatest symphonist between Beethoven and Gustav Mahler in terms of originality, boldness and monumentality of his music. The image of Bruckner the man, however, is still extreme instance of the tenacious power of prejudice. No less a figure than Gustav Mahler coined the apercu about Bruckner being -a simpleton half genius, half imbecile-. The author is out to correct that misperception. His thesis in this study is that contrary to what has hitherto been asserted, there is an intimate...

Music is often defined as art for the ear, as the language of feeling, of the heart, as sound play, or as the science of composition. But music also conveys intellectual and emotional experiences, literary, religious, philosophical, social and political ideas. Countless composers encrypt contents in their music that can be deciphered by a variety of methods. This book is designed as an introduction to the basic questions of musical semantics and discusses Beethoven's committed art, the core ideas of the Ring of the Nibelung and of the Symphony of a Thousand, Wagner's idea of a religion of...