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BUY FROM PUBLISHER Available as an ebook at: Amazon Kindle Apple iBooks Barnes & Noble Nook Chegg Inc CNPeReading Copia Interactive Google Play PageFoundry	A Language of Its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music by Ruth Katz University of Chicago Press, 2009 eISBN: 978-0-226-42598-6 \| Cloth: 978-0-226-42596-2 \| Paper: 978-0-226-42597-9 Library of Congress Classification ML60.K18 2009 Dewey Decimal Classification 781.68117 ABOUT THIS BOOK \| AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY \| REVIEWS \| TOC \| REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE ABOUT THIS BOOK The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensible relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Ruth Katz is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor Emerita of Musicology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. REVIEWS “This book is the crowning achievement of a first-rate scholar, drawing on decades of intensive as well as extensive expertise. The perspective it offers on Western art music is not just exceptionally well informed but also thoroughly original. Scholars in generations to come will find it an invaluable document of how scholars working at the end of the Western canonic paradigm viewed that paradigm.” — Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University “A Language of Its Own is not a long moan about the rise and fall of Western music. Ruth Katz is an elegant analyst, not a polemicist. And she is hopeful that our musical tradition can regain its footing, perhaps by recreating the ‘abstracting’ process that allowed Western music, despite its inability to describe what it does, to beguile and fascinate us for so long.” — Wall Street Journal “This is a history of Western art music ‘in its entirety,’ a process of historical development, in the old-fashioned Hegelian sense, that ‘culminated in what is generally known as “absolute music.”’ The result is a Fukuyamalike reading of the end of a musical history that was completed by the composition of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century works.” — Times Literary Supplement “Intertwining musicology with cultural and intellectual history, Ruth Katz produces an almost unnervingly brilliant philosophical history of sound. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber, Katz is able to draw upon semiotics—as Weber was not—to understand musical rationalization. Reconstructing Western music as a signifying system without concrete referent, A Language of Its Own inserts music analysis into contemporary debates about culture and social theory.” — Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Introduction: The Guiding Conception of Western Art Music PART I The Structuring of a Self-Referential World 1 THE MAKING OF MUSICAL BUILDING BLOCKS Preliminary Clarifications The Development of Western Notation and Its Significance Gregorian Chant Revisited The Rise of Notation as an Autonomous System Pitch Duration Concerning Notation: Concluding Remarks Musical Frameworks as Referential Systems The Greek Heritage: Music as an Organized Auditory Phenomenon The Musical Heritage of the World That Gave Rise to Christianity The Formal Organization of the Chant Repertoire 2 SYSTEMATIZING MUSICAL LAWS The Self-Chosen Confi nes of Art Horizontal and Vertical Elements: A Generating and Controlling Force, Respectively Cementing the Relationships among Successively Composed Voices “The Function of Closure” From Imperfect to Perfect Consonance—Relating Voices and Sonorities by Interval Progressions Bestowing a Semblance of “Oneness” on Particles External Designs The Development of Inner Cohesion The Rise of Harmonic Tonality The Move from Desired Coincidences among Voices to a “System of Chords” The Systematization of Harmonic Tonality Shifting Concerns—From Musical “Rules” to Music’s Communicative “Powers” PART II The Crafting of a “Shared Understanding” 3 SEPARATING ‘SENSE’ FROM ‘MEANING’ Natural Languages: Some Relevant Points The Power to Occasion an Atmosphere Drama Aspiring toward the “Condition of Music” The Legacy of the Humanists Empirical Observation and Aesthetic Theory Demystifying an Elusive Agenda The Camerata: Custodian of a Paradigm Leading Conceptual Turning Points A Fundamental Change in the Conception of ArtSigns as Cognitive Tools Moral Philosophy and Its “Affair” with ‘Beauty’ Modes of Communication and Cognitive Expansions Social Interaction as a Regulating Force The Sagacity of Sensate Discourse Human Consciousness as a Creator of “Truths” The Sign and the Signified in Western Music 4 PROBING THE LIMITS OF MUSICAL COHERENCE The Referential Function of Learned Schemata: External versus Internal References Perception Replacing Conception The Return of an Enigma Music’s Spiritual Peculiarity as Distinct from Its Mundane Technical Aspects The Changed Status of the Artist The Merger of the Arts Tantalizing the Ear and Luring the Mind The Reformulation of Musical Structure From General “Language” to Particularized “Speech” A General Theory concerning the Function of Symbol Systems in the Arts The Flaunting of Identities: Individual and Collective Intimacy Made Public The Particularization of Publics Music as a Cultural Subsystem The Blend between Past and Future in Romantic Thought Internal References Challenged The Variable Functions of Theory PART III The Retreat from the “Shared Understanding” 5 A SHIFT IN THOUGHT AND THEORY The Organic Nature of the Theoretical Presuppositions of Music in the West The Romantic Era from a Bird’s-Eye View The Relationship between the Composer and the Public Revisited Aesthetic Autonomy—Art for Art’s Sake ‘Music’: From Closed System to Open Concept Some Characteristics of the “Turn” of the Century “Aristotelianism” in Musical Aesthetics “Concerning the Musically Beautiful” In Defense of Musicology as Envisioned Diverging Trends in Fin-de-Siecle Music and Musical Analysis Landmarks in a New “Tonal” Environment Defying the “Soundness” of the Harmonic System The Establishment of a Musical Canon Atonal and Twelve-Tone Music Developments That Affected Music’s External Semblance Lending Saliency to the “Social Role of Art” 6 THE APPROPRIATION OF MUSICAL MEANING The Rise of a Heteronomous Aesthetic The General Distrust of Categorical Systems Alternate Perspectives on the Relation between ‘Conception’ and ‘Perception’ The Relationship between Form and Formal Function Reexamined The Pliability of the Nonrepresentational The Function of “Inclusive Symbols” The Appropriation of Meaning Evaluating Music: How and in What Way? Concluding Remarks Bibliography Index REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE If you are a student who has a disability that prevents you from using this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access. Please have the disability coordinator at your school fill out this form. It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled. See other books on: Instruction & Study \| Its Own \| Meaning \| Philosophy and aesthetics \| Sense See other titles from University of Chicago Press

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REVIEWS

“This book is the crowning achievement of a first-rate scholar, drawing on decades of intensive as well as extensive expertise. The perspective it offers on Western art music is not just exceptionally well informed but also thoroughly original. Scholars in generations to come will find it an invaluable document of how scholars working at the end of the Western canonic paradigm viewed that paradigm.”

— Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University

“A Language of Its Own is not a long moan about the rise and fall of Western music. Ruth Katz is an elegant analyst, not a polemicist. And she is hopeful that our musical tradition can regain its footing, perhaps by recreating the ‘abstracting’ process that allowed Western music, despite its inability to describe what it does, to beguile and fascinate us for so long.”

— Wall Street Journal

“This is a history of Western art music ‘in its entirety,’ a process of historical development, in the old-fashioned Hegelian sense, that ‘culminated in what is generally known as “absolute music.”’ The result is a Fukuyamalike reading of the end of a musical history that was completed by the composition of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century works.”

— Times Literary Supplement

“Intertwining musicology with cultural and intellectual history, Ruth Katz produces an almost unnervingly brilliant philosophical history of sound. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber, Katz is able to draw upon semiotics—as Weber was not—to understand musical rationalization. Reconstructing Western music as a signifying system without concrete referent, A Language of Its Own inserts music analysis into contemporary debates about culture and social theory.”

— Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University