What is musical meaning? Where does it reside and how can it be known? Does it make a difference to its meaning if the music is composed with or without words, as a symphony or a song? Why is it claimed that music can express human feelings with an immediacy not possible in other languages or arts? What is contained in the claim that music is autonomous, or that it is prophetic and can articulate a 'politics for the future'? Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses these classic questions of German Romanticism. On the way, she offers an account of the peculiar relation that was established between philosophy and music in the nineteenth century; a philosophical and political reading of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger; an account of the Wagner-Hanslick debate on musical formalism; an argument for resituating musical autonomy in the spirit of Wagner's Gesamtkuntswerk; an account of the competing performance ideals embodied in Wagner's Bayreuth; and an interpretation of Wagner's legacy as experienced by composers exiled from Nazi Germany. Goehr's historical and musicological enquiries are unified by a philosophical study of the impact of a transcendental or critical perspective on philosophical theory. She argues that philosophy needs to take its limits seriously to accommodate the primacy of music's practice.
Wagner enthusiasts will certainly find much of interest in The Quest for Voice. British Journal of Aesthetics
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From the Inside Flap
"This is the work of a distinguished philosopher and a well-trained musician with a sophisticated sense of history. If the musical and the musicological world were inhabited by Goehrs, it would be a far, far better place. The message of this book deserves the widest possible dissemination."--Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2009/2010 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, in 2007/8 The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA), and in 2005, a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities.
In 2002-3, she was the visiting Aby Warburg Professor in Hamburg and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskollegzu Berlin. In 2005-6, she delivered the Royal Holloway-British Library Lectures in Musicology in London and the Wort Lectures at Cambridge University. In 2008, she was a Visiting Professor at the FreieUniversität, Berlin (Cluster: "The Language of Emotions") andin 2009, a visiting professor in the FU-Berlin SFB Theater und Fest. In 2010, she was IAS Visiting Fellow, Warwick University, and for the next three years she will serve as the Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Visiting Professor in the Philosophy of Music, Warwick University.
Lydia Goehr is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992; second edition with a new essay, 2007, with translations in Greek and Chinese); The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998); Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory [essays on Adorno and Danto] (2008), and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment. Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006). She has written many articleson the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Arthur Danto. She offers courses in the history of aesthetic theory, the contemporary philosophy of the arts, critical theory, and the philosophy of history. Her research interests are in German aesthetic theory and in particular in the relationship between philosophy, politics, history, and music. With Gregg Horowitz, she is series editor of ColumbiaThemes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, Columbia University Press. She is presently writing a book on the place of music in the age-old contest of the arts.
Lydia Goehr leads the Faculty-Students Aesthetics Group which meets weekly during the semester and welcomes students and faculty from many disciplines, from Columbia University and the New York area.
For more, see her website http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/fac-bios/goehr/faculty.html
