Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era

Taylor, Benedict

ISBN 10: 0190206055 / ISBN 13: 9780190206055

Published by Oxford University Press, 2015

About this Item

Dust jacket in very good condition. First edition, first printing. Minor shelf and handling wear, overall a clean solid copy with minimal signs of use. The dust jacket has been placed in protective mylar for preservation. The text block is clean and free of staining. The binding is tight; the pages are clean and unmarked. Secure packaging for safe delivery. 1.3.

Seller Inventory # 1246745192

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190206055
• ISBN 13: 9780190206055
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history.
Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought.
The Melody of Time examines the multiple ways in which music relates to, and may provide insight into, the problematics of human time. Each chapter explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music: the purported timelessness of Beethoven's late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert's music; the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as a medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time; and, a reflection of a particular culture's sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history itself. Moving fluidly between cultural context and historical reception, competing philosophical theories of time and close reading of the repertoire, Benedict Taylor argues for the continued importance of engaging with music's temporality in understanding the significance of music within society and human experience. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, The Melody of Time provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

About the Author

Benedict Taylor is Chancellor's Fellow in the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form, and a number of studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music.