What do you think?
Rate this book
Platonism, Music and the Listener's Share
What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the standards (if any) that they set for a competent, intelligent, and musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Should the work-concept henceforth be dissolved as some New Musicologists would have it into the various, ever-changing socio-cultural or ideological contexts that make up its reception-history to date? Can music be thought of as possessing certain attributes, structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that are response-transcendent, i.e., that might always elude or surpass the best state of (current or future) informed opinion?
These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and other debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a qualified Platonist approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement. At the same time this approach would leave room for listeners share the phenomenology of musical experience in so far as those works necessarily depend for their repeated realisation from one performance or audition to the next upon certain subjectively salient modalities of human perceptual and cognitive response.
Norris argues for a more philosophically and musically informed treatment of these issues that combines the best insights of the analytic and the continental traditions. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Norris's book, true to this dual orientation, is its way of raising such issues through a constant appeal to the vivid actuality of music as a challenge to philosophic thought. This is a fascinating study of musical understanding from one of the worlds leading contemporary theorists.
What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the standards (if any) that they set for a competent, intelligent, and musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Should the work-concept henceforth be dissolved as some New Musicologists would have it into the various, ever-changing socio-cultural or ideological contexts that make up its reception-history to date? Can music be thought of as possessing certain attributes, structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that are response-transcendent, i.e., that might always elude or surpass the best state of (current or future) informed opinion?
These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and other debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a qualified Platonist approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement. At the same time this approach would leave room for listeners share the phenomenology of musical experience in so far as those works necessarily depend for their repeated realisation from one performance or audition to the next upon certain subjectively salient modalities of human perceptual and cognitive response.
Norris argues for a more philosophically and musically informed treatment of these issues that combines the best insights of the analytic and the continental traditions. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Norris's book, true to this dual orientation, is its way of raising such issues through a constant appeal to the vivid actuality of music as a challenge to philosophic thought. This is a fascinating study of musical understanding from one of the worlds leading contemporary theorists.
These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and other debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a qualified Platonist approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement. At the same time this approach would leave room for listeners share the phenomenology of musical experience in so far as those works necessarily depend for their repeated realisation from one performance or audition to the next upon certain subjectively salient modalities of human perceptual and cognitive response.
Norris argues for a more philosophically and musically informed treatment of these issues that combines the best insights of the analytic and the continental traditions. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Norris's book, true to this dual orientation, is its way of raising such issues through a constant appeal to the vivid actuality of music as a challenge to philosophic thought. This is a fascinating study of musical understanding from one of the worlds leading contemporary theorists.
What is a musical work? What are its identity-conditions and the standards (if any) that they set for a competent, intelligent, and musically perceptive act of performance or audition? Should the work-concept henceforth be dissolved as some New Musicologists would have it into the various, ever-changing socio-cultural or ideological contexts that make up its reception-history to date? Can music be thought of as possessing certain attributes, structural features, or intrinsically valuable qualities that are response-transcendent, i.e., that might always elude or surpass the best state of (current or future) informed opinion?
These are some of the questions that Christopher Norris addresses by way of a sustained critical engagement with the New Musicology and other debates in recent philosophy of music. His book puts the case for a qualified Platonist approach that would respect the relative autonomy of musical works as objects of more or less adequate understanding, appreciation, and evaluative judgement. At the same time this approach would leave room for listeners share the phenomenology of musical experience in so far as those works necessarily depend for their repeated realisation from one performance or audition to the next upon certain subjectively salient modalities of human perceptual and cognitive response.
Norris argues for a more philosophically and musically informed treatment of these issues that combines the best insights of the analytic and the continental traditions. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Norris's book, true to this dual orientation, is its way of raising such issues through a constant appeal to the vivid actuality of music as a challenge to philosophic thought. This is a fascinating study of musical understanding from one of the worlds leading contemporary theorists.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
7 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Norris
140 books18 followersAs of 2007 he is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He completed his PhD in English at University College London in 1975, while Sir Frank Kermode served as the Lord Northcliffe Professor of modern English literature there.
Until 1991 Norris taught in the Cardiff English Department. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, the City University of New York and Dartmouth College.
He is one of the world's leading scholars on deconstruction, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida. He has written numerous books and papers on literary theory and continental philosophy. Norris is now considered a philosopher in his own right: 2003's Life After Theory reference required featured an interview with Norris, placing him alongside Derrida as a significant contemporary.
Until 1991 Norris taught in the Cardiff English Department. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at a number of institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, the City University of New York and Dartmouth College.
He is one of the world's leading scholars on deconstruction, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida. He has written numerous books and papers on literary theory and continental philosophy. Norris is now considered a philosopher in his own right: 2003's Life After Theory reference required featured an interview with Norris, placing him alongside Derrida as a significant contemporary.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 12, 2013
Pretty much okay, I guess, or whatever. Certainly a difficult land-bridge to build, but not sure what the advantages are of his view over others. Seems more like a collection of things he likes, rather than a bunch of arguments supporting his view. Of course the extreme views are too extreme, but we all know that. So take a moderate route . . . right, and there's certainly something somewhere in the book comparing these other moderate routes, but the advantages could be weighed more appropriately, rather than having long and tedious, but somewhat interesting, and irrelevant digressions into other things Norris likes. I like music too!
Displaying 1 of 1 review