On The Nature Of Musical Experience

On the Nature of Musical Experience discusses the shared beliefs of twenty prominent aestheticians, composers, theorists, and educators, and identifies fourteen features of musical experience as widespread phenomenon.

This book explores the various ways music affects people and how they create meaning from everyday musical experiences, from infancy through old age. These experiences help us construct meaning and understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our world. The contributors examine the nature of musical experience and how it changes throughout our lifespan.

Explaining that musicality is an essential touchstone of the human experience, a concise introduction to the study of the nature of music, its community and its cultural values explains the diverse work of today's ethnomusicologists and how researchers apply anthropological and other social disciplines to studies of human and cultural behaviors. Original.

In this book, Flora Levin explores how and why music was so important to the ancient Greeks. She examines the distinctions that they drew between the theory of music as an art ruled by number and the theory wherein number is held to be ruled by the art of music. These perspectives generated more expansive theories, particularly the idea that the cosmos is a mirror-image of music's structural elements and, conversely, that music by virtue of its cosmic elements - time, motion, and the continuum - is itself a mirror-image of the cosmos. These opposing perspectives gave rise to two opposing schools of thought, the Pythagorean and the Aristoxenian. Levin argues that the clash between these two schools could never be reconciled because the inherent conflict arises from two different worlds of mathematics. Her book shows how the Greeks' appreciation of the profundity of music's interconnections with philosophy, mathematics, and logic led to groundbreaking intellectual achievements that no civilization has ever matched.

This volume presents essays assessing the contributions phenomenology has to make to environmental studies.

In this volume, Zangwill develops a view of the nature of music and our experience of music that foregrounds the aesthetic properties of music. He focuses on metaphysical issues about aesthetic properties of music, psychological issues about the nature of musical experience, and philosophy of language issues about the metaphorical nature of aesthetic descriptions of music. Among the innovations of this book, Zangwill addresses the limits of literal description, generally, and in the aesthetic case. He also explores the social and political issues about musical listening, which tend to be addressed more in continental traditions.

The Musical Experience proposes a new concept - musical experience - as the most effective framework for navigating the shifting terrain of educational policy as it is applied to music education. The editors and contributors define musical experience as being characterized by the depth of affective and emotional responses that music generates. The chapters map out the primary forms of musical engagement - performing, listening, improvising, and composing - as activities which play a key role in classroom teaching. They also address the cultural scope of musical experience, which calls for the consideration of time, place, beliefs, and values to be placed upon musical activities. The Musical Experience discusses how music teachers can most effectively rely on means of musical communication to lead students toward the development and refinement of musical skills, understandings, and expression in educational settings. This book serves to expand upon the dimensions of musical experience and provides, from the forefront of the field, an integrated yet panoramic view of the educational processes involved in music teaching and learning.

In this landmark series of lectures, Rudolf Steiner challenges the notion that human consciousness has in essence remained the same throughout history. On the contrary, we can only see the past in its true light when we study the differences in human souls during the various historical eras. Consciousness, he says, evolves constantly and we can only comprehend the present by understanding its origin in the past. Delivered in the evenings during the course of the ‘mystery act’ of the Christmas Foundation Meeting – when Rudolf Steiner not only re-founded the Anthroposophical Society but for the first time took a formal role within it – these lectures study world history in parallel with the ancient mysteries of initiation, showing how they are intimately linked. Steiner describes consciousness in the ancient East and follows the initiation principle from Babylonia to Greece, up to its influences in present-day spiritual life. He also discusses Gilgamesh and Eabani, the mysteries of Ephesus and Hibernia, and the occult relationship between the destruction by fire of the Temple of Artemis and the burning of the first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Published for the first time with colour plates of Steiner’s blackboard drawings, the freshly-revised text is complemented with an introduction, notes and appendices by Professor Frederick Amrine and an index.