Thursday, February 19, 2009

New Music & Philosophers

Philosophers have only sporadically paid serious attention to the new music of their time  (let's count the names: Plato... Boethius... Rousseau... Nietzsche... Adorno...).  Even when they've paid attention, it can often be a decidedly uneven bundle of ideas and words.  Nevertheless, I'm always prepared to at least consider the ideas and words of someone prepared to take music seriously and I often get some compositional kick-back from the effort, if only to negate an idea that strikes me as profoundly off from my own experience.  (Interestingly, philosophy more in an Anglo-American positivist mode about music tends to yields results which are easy to agree with, but difficult, as a practicing musician or composer to do anything useful with).  Two more recent thinkers-about-music-now have useful web presences: the late Daniel Charles (mostly in French),  here and the very much still-with-us-and-at-us Heinz-Klaus Metzger (in German) here.

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