Music Philology

In The Critical Editing of Music (1996) James Grier called Georg Feder's Musikphilologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987) "the most important contribution to date" on textual criticism in music and "the only one that considers the full range of critical issues in editing" (Grier, p. 14). Pendragon Press's edition of Feder's Music Philology now makes available in English translation this essential, intellectually engaging but concise discussion of the complex and multi-faceted tasks in traditional scholarly editing of music. --

This volume invites to bridge the traditional gap between the author and the scribes, which means between the "original text" and the “copies” in order deal with more complex situations, in which the performer, the screenwriter, or the director...

From Philosophy to Philology is an indispensable work on the intellectual life of China’s literati in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there was not a scientific revolution in China, there was an intellectual one. The shock of the Manchu conquest and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 led to a rejection of the moral self-cultivation that dominated intellectual life under the Ming. China’s scholars, particularly in the Yangzi River Basin, sought to restore China’s greatness by recapturing the wisdom of the ancients from the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.) and the Former Han dynasty (202 B.C.–9 A.D.), much as Renaissance Europe rediscovered the Greeks and Romans. But in China scholars faced the daunting task of determining which of many editions of the Classics were the true originals and which were forged additions of later centuries. The ensuing search for authentic texts led to the founding of academies and libraries, the compiling of bibliographies, the rise of printing of editions of the Classics and Histories and commentaries on their components, the study of ancient inscriptions, and a two-hundred-year effort to discover and discard forged texts. In the process rigorous standards of scholarly training were adopted, and scholarship became a full-time profession distinct from gentry farmers or imperial officials.

Since it was first published in 1993, the Sourcebook for Research in Music has become an invaluable resource in musical scholarship. The balance between depth of content and brevity of format makes it ideal for use as a textbook for students, a reference work for faculty and professional musicians, and as an aid for librarians. The introductory chapter includes a comprehensive list of bibliographical terms with definitions; bibliographic terms in German, French, and Italian; and the plan of the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal music classification systems. Integrating helpful commentary to instruct the reader on the scope and usefulness of specific items, this updated and expanded edition accounts for the rapid growth in new editions of standard works, in fields such as ethnomusicology, performance practice, women in music, popular music, education, business, and music technology. These enhancements to its already extensive bibliographies ensures that the Sourcebook will continue to be an indispensable reference for years to come.

Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.

As the Christian doctrine of Incarnation asserts, “the Word became Flesh.” Yet, while this metaphor is grounded in Christian tradition, its varied functions far exceed any purely theological import. It speaks to the nature of God just as much as to the nature of language. In Philology of the Flesh, John T. Hamilton explores writing and reading practices that engage this notion in a range of poetic enterprises and theoretical reflections. By pressing the notion of philology as “love” (philia) for the “word” (logos), Hamilton’s readings investigate the breadth, depth, and limits of verbal styles that are irreducible to mere information. While a philologist of the body might understand words as corporeal vessels of core meaning, the philologist of the flesh, by focusing on the carnal qualities of language, resists taking words as mere containers. By examining a series of intellectual episodes—from the fifteenth-century Humanism of Lorenzo Valla to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, from Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann to Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan—Philology of the Flesh considers the far-reaching ramifications of the incarnational metaphor, insisting on the inseparability of form and content, an insistence that allows us to rethink our relation to the concrete languages in which we think and live.

This book unfolds the manifold, complex and intertwined relations between Fuzzy Logic and music in a first comprehensive overview on this topic: systematically as an outline, as completely as possible, in the aspects of Fuzzy Logic in this relation, and especially in music as a process with three main phases, five anthropological layers, and thirteen forms of existence of the art work (Classics, Jazz, Pop, Folklore). Being concerned with the ontological, gnoseological, psychological, and (music-) aesthetical status and the relative importance of different phenomena of relationship between music and Fuzzy Logic, the explication follows the four main principles (with five phenotypes) of Fuzzy Logic with respect to music: similarity, sharpening 1 as filtering, sharpening 2 as crystallization, blurring, and variation. The book reports on years of author’s research on topics that have been only little explored so far in the area of Music and Fuzzy Logic. It merges concepts of music analysis with fuzzy logical modes of thinking, in a unique way that is expected to attract both specialists of music and specialists of Fuzzy Logic, and also non-specialists in both fields. The book introduces the concept of dialectic between sharpening and – conscious – “blurring”. In turn, some important aspects of this dialectic are discussed, placing them in an historical dimension, and ending in the postulation of a 'musical turn' in the sciences, with some important reflections concerning a “Philosophy of Fuzzy Logic”. Moreover, a production-oriented thinking is borrowed from fuzzy logic to musicology in this book, opening new perspectives in music, and possibly also in other artistic fields.

In The Critical Editing of Music (1996) James Grier called Georg Feder's Musikphilologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987) "the most important contribution to date" on textual criticism in music and "the only one that considers the full range of critical issues in editing" (Grier, p. 14). Pendragon Press's edition of Feder's Music Philology now makes available in English translation this essential, intellectually engaging but concise discussion of the complex and multi-faceted tasks in traditional scholarly editing of music. From the Middle Ages to the present, music has been written down and disseminated in notated form. In evaluating music notation, philological methods have been used more and more. These methods come from linguistic disciplines and are linked with specifically musical traditions and subjects. Starting with the relationships of music and language, tradition and understanding, work and text, Feder describes the fundamentals of music philology and its tasks. In addition to the musical sources themselves, theoretical and historical sources enable the critical study of questions about authenticity, dating, origin, and dissemination.