Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Year 1935. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> This book is designed to offer primarily to college students but also to the general reader who is interested in penetrating beneath the surface an ap-proach to the endless riches of musical literature. It is first of all a textbook in the history of music; but it gives also an expanded view of the field more narrowly covered by the many current books on musical appreciation. To those who are beginning the serious study of the subject such a com-bination of historical and appreciative treatment is necessary; for the technical history of music is intelligible only to those whose background of appreciation is already largely established. Adequate appreciation of music on the other hand is impossible without a considerable awareness of the historical evolution of the art. The current literature of appreciation presents the forms and processes of musical structure as self-existent arbitrary facts originated by creative genius and authenticated by the theoretical analyst. But the history of music reveals that these forms are not arbitrary at all and that both the forms and the ex-pressive values of music are to a great extent a result of the endeavor to represent through these forms a wide region of thought and feeling which is originally quite unrelated to music. Like language or any of the other arts music is a conventional utterance assuming in different periods the form to which it is constrained by its relation to other existing conventions of life. It has to be sure its own intrinsic laws dictated by the nature of the musical substance. But it grows not by virtue of these laws but in spite of them. That is the forms of music are to be understood as a product of the fertilization of music through the world of human experience. Genius is the agent not the source of such creations. (MP)