Musical Concerns: Essays in Philosophy of Music

by Jerrold Levinson

This volume presents a new collection of essays, all of them dealing with music, by Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today. It follows in the line of Levinson's earlier collections, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), and Contemplating Art (2006), and is representative of the most stimulating work being done under the rubric of analytic aesthetics. The essays, which are wide-ranging, should appeal to aestheticians, philosophers, musicologists, music theorists, music critics and music lovers of all kinds. Three of the twelve essays comprising the volume have not previously been published, and in somewhat of a departure for Levinson, four of the essays focus on music in the jazz tradition.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2015

About the author

Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is particularly noted for his work on the aesthetics of music, as well as for his search for meaning and ontology in film, art and humour.

Reviews

[kac attac · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The laureates and other scientists of stature often report scrapping research papers that simply did not measure up to their own demanding standards or to those of their colleagues. ...a referee’s incisive report on a manuscript sent to a journal of physics asserts a relevant consequence of a scientist’s failure to exercise rigorous judgment in deciding whether to publish or not to publish: “If C——— would write fewer papers, more people would read them.””

Robert K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science”