Music Theory and Philosophy

 

Required Readings

 

Stanley Cavell. “Music Discomposed.” In Must We Mean What We Say?. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 180–212.

 

David Lewin. “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception.” Music Perception 3/4 (1986): 327–92.

 

Christopher Norris. “Deconstruction, Musicology and Analysis.” Thesis Eleven 56 (1999), 107–118.

 

Suggested Readings

Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno. “On the Problem of Musical Analysis.” Music Analysis 1/2 (1982), 169–87.

 

Andrew Edgar, "Adorno and Musical Analysis." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57/4 (1999), 439-49.

 

Theodor W. Adorno. “Form in the New Music.” Music Analysis 27/2-3 (2008): 201–16.

 

Michael Gallope. "The Imminent Structure." In Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Positivism

Matthew Brown and Douglas Dempster. “The Scientific Image of Music Theory.” Journal of Music Theory 33/1 (1089): 65–106.

 

Taruskin, Richard. “Reply to Brown and Dempster.” Journal of Music Theory 33/1 (1989). 155–64.

 

Giles Hooper. “An Incomplete Project: Modernism, Formalism and the ‘Music Itself’.” Music Analysis 23/2-3 (2004): 311–29.

 

James A. Davis.“Positivism, Logic and Atonal Analysis.” Music review 53/3 (1992): 210–20.

 

James A. Davis. “Philosophical Positivism and American Atonal Music Theory.” Journal of the History of Ideas 56/3 (1995), 501–22.

Reflections on Cavell's "Music Discomposed" at 40

Dmitri Tymoczko. "Dear Stanley."Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 5–23.

 

Lawrence Kramer. "Music Recomposed: Remarks on the History of the Same." Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 25-36.

 

Franklin Cox. "Stanley Cavell on Modern Music: “Music Discomposed” and “A Matter of Meaning It” After Forty Years."Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 37–60.

 

Eric Drott."Fraudulence and the Gift Economy of Music." Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 61–74.

 

Amy Bauer. “Philosophy Recomposed: Stanley Cavell and the Critique of New Music,” Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 75–92.

 

Richard Beaudoin. "You're There and You're Not There: Musical Borrowing and Cavell's 'Way'.” Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 91–105.

 

Michael Gallope. "Cavell and Deleuze."Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 107–120.

 

Stephen Decatur Smith. "“We Look Away and Leap Around”: Music, Ethics, and the Transcendental in Cavell and Adorno." Journal of Music Theory 54.1 (2010), 121–140.

Reflections on Lewin's "Phenomenology"

Judy Lochhead “Phenomenological Approaches to the Analysis of Music: Report From Binghamton.Theory and Practice 11 (1986), 9–13.

 

Kane, Brian. “Excavating Lewin’s “Phenomenology”.” Music Theory Spectrum 33/1 (2011), 27–36.

 

Maryam A. Moshaver. "Telos and Temporality: Phenomenology and the Experience of Time in Lewin's Study of Perception." Journal of the American Musicological Society 65/1 (Spring 2012), 179-214.

Deleuze

Martin Scherzinger. “Musical Modernism in the Thought of “mille Plateaux,” and Its Twofold Politics.” Perspectives of New Music 46/2 (2008), 130–58.

 

Michael Gallope. “Is There a Deleuzian Musical Work?” Perspectives of New Music 46/2 (2008): 93-129.

 

Edward Campbell. Music After Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Other

Scherzinger, Martin. “The Finale of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: A Deconstructive Reading.” Music Analysis 14/1 (1995), 69–88.

 

Martin Scherzinger. “The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique.” In Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 252-77.

 

Salomé Voegelin. Sonic materialism: A philosophy of digging." In The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

 

Special Issue of Contemporary Music Review: Music and Philosophy. 2012.

 

Special Issue of Contemporary Music Review: Musical Materialisms. 2020.