What we think music is shapes how we hear it. This book traces the history of the idea of pure - 'absolute' - music from Pythagoras to the present, with special

"Arved Ashby writes with a keen sense of the historical processes, ironies, and reversals that seem to characterize the ways that musicologists think about, and

This volume examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical backgrounds. In exploring the origins of the idea and its career

This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nin

A deeply personal, intimate conversation about music and writing between the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author and the former conductor of the Bost