Philosophy of Music

[Angi István]

(b Ojdula, 16 Oct 1933) Romanian music aesthetician and musicologist. He is considered the founder of musical aesthetics in Romania. Ştefan Angi studied at Cluj-Napoca Conservatory (1953–8) where his teachers included Márkos Albert (music theory), Jodál Gabor (harmony), Max Eisikovits (counterpoint), Jagamas János (forms), Földes László (aesthetics), Lakatos István and Benkő András (music history), Zsurka Péter (violin), Ana Voileanu-Nicoară (chamber music), Antonin Ciolan (orchestral ensemble), and Szenik Ilona (folklore). He then studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University (1963–5), with the philosopher Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus, where he graduated with a dissertation on Music and Affectivity and took the PhD in Romania in 1966. In 1958 he joined the academic staff of Cluj-Napoca Conservatory and between 1976 and 1986 was the dean of the Theoretic Faculty. He was awarded the ‘Cultural Merit’ medal (1970) and the ‘Romanian Academy Award’ (1977). Angi is a permanent correspondent on serial radio broadcasts, has published more than 100 articles, and has attended 70 conferences – on musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics....

(b Sibiu, 4 Nov 1956) Romanian musicologist and music aesthetician. He studied at Cluj-Napoca Conservatory (1976–81) where he joined the academic staff (in 1996), earned a doctorate on music aesthetics (1999), was pro-rector (2008–12), and became president of the Senate in 2012.

Owing to his multiple interests Banciu has been recognized as a member of several professional music associations (starting in 2002), an evaluator on many national committees and music competitions (starting in 2006), a member of the board of directors at the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists (starting in 2014), the vice-president of the ‘Performing Arts Commission’ within the National Council for the Certification of University Titles, Diplomas, and Certificates (C.N.A.T.D.C.U., starting in 2016), a peer reviewer on journals (Musicology Papers, Musicology Today, Studia Musica), and an organizer of international conferences (The International Congress on Musical Signification in ...

[Fišer, Zbyněk]

(b Prague, 20 Jan 1930; d Bratislava, 9 April 2007).Czech philosopher, writer, and poet, and a leading figure of the Czechoslovak underground. Egon Bondy’s legendary career began in 1947, when he briefly joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia only to resign immediately after the party’s takeover in February 1948. For the next ten years Bondy freewheeled on the edge of the law, proto-beatnik style. During those years he gained visibility among members of the underground by cofounding the illegal samizdat review Půlnoc (‘Midnight’). With the 1949 Půlnoc collection Jewish Names he started to use the name Egon Bondy. In 1957 he enrolled at Prague’s Charles University on distance study while working as a nighttime security guard. He received the PhD in 1967 with a dissertation entitled Útěcha z ontologie (‘Consolation from Ontology’). From that year Bondy lived on disability while continuing to write, but other than his study ...

In music, the relation between verbal stress and melodic accent in the setting and delivery of a text. Clear and appropriate text setting, measured by quantity or quality, was extolled by humanist thinkers in the Renaissance on the basis of classical precedent, and it was central to the emergence of recitative and the ‘new music’ in Florence during the late 16th century. Throughout the Baroque period, the notion of the musician as orator, persuading and moving an audience, depended on proper declamation. The subject was often discussed by theorists, particularly as clear declamation became threatened by the more musical demands of the aria. J.G. Walther (WaltherML) applied to music the rationalistic concept of declamation, which originally dealt with speech, and focussed his attention on recitative. J.J. Rousseau (Dictionnaire, 1768) dealt with declamation as the relationship between musical and linguistic accent, which had been much discussed in French singing treatises, such as Bénigne de Bacilly’s ...

The intensity of volume with which notes and sounds are expressed. In the 20th century dynamics came to be seen as one of the fundamental parameters of composition which function interdependently to create musical meaning and structure.

Dynamic variation is so natural to the performance of almost all styles of music that its presence can normally be assumed even when indications for it are mainly or even entirely absent from the notation. That dynamic transitions occurred in the music of ancient Greece is suggested by Plutarch’s accounts, and it is likely that the monophonic hymns of the 1st century ce displayed nuances of volume illustrating their meaning or imitating the tone of speech. Medieval musicians had no word for ‘dynamics’ per se, but it is implicit in the concepts of structura and processus. By the early Renaissance period dynamic values were reflected in changes in the number of voices and their registers. In Josquin’s ...

Member of Goehr family

(b London, Jan 10, 1960). British philosopher, daughter of Alexander Goehr. After her first degree in philosophy at the Universities of Exeter and Manchester (1982), she took the PhD at Cambridge with a dissertation, The Work of Music (1987). She subsequently held academic posts at the University of Nevada at Reno (1986–7), Boston University (1987–9), Harvard University (1989–90) and Wesleyan University (1989–97) before being appointed professor of philosophy at Columbia University (1995). Her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), adapted from her dissertation, engages in a radical way with discussions by analytic philosophers about the question of the ontology of a musical work. An ontological question asks what it is for any entity to have existence, or to ‘be’; applied to music, it takes the form of asking what it is for a piece of music to be defined as a ‘work’ or to have a singular ‘identity’. (Is the work a material thing? Does it consist in the score? Is it an ideal in the mind of the composer? Is it a compendium of possible performances?) This question was opened up most notably by the philosopher Roman Ingarden, who approached it from a phenomenological point of view (...

Traditionally, noise has been thought of as the outside of music and meaning. In systems theory, noise is disruption of the signal or message; in biological terms, it is associated with pain, in legal terms it is associated with disturbance. Noise is also that which has hitherto been excluded from being proper music, so can include radical new directions in musical form (Wagner, Coltrane) as well as noises deemed unmusical. The term noise implies a judgement about the type of sound, performance, or piece, not an inherent quality of it. This means that the idea of noise has always been historicized within music philosophy. Luigi Russolo proposed (in 1913) that noise was both an essential part of nature and a new reality of the industrialized metropolis. Purposeful use of noise, would, ironically, bring a new social harmony. John Cage expanded the definition of what could occur in the place of music, from silence (more accurately, the absence of silence) to machine sounds (turntables, radios, prepared pianos). In ...

(Louis)

Member of Seeger family

(b Mexico City, Dec 14, 1886; d Bridgewater, CT, Feb 7, 1979). American musicologist, composer, conductor, critic and musical philosopher. His initial interest was in composition and conducting, and he joined numerous young American composers in Europe in the years immediately following his graduation from Harvard (1908). He spent a season (1910–11) as a conductor at the Cologne Opera before returning to the USA as a composer and chairman of the department of music at the University of California, Berkeley (1912–19), where he gave the first American courses in musicology in 1916. Several of his compositions were destroyed in the Berkeley fire (1923). Subsequently he was a lecturer and instructor at the Institute of Musical Art, New York (1921–33), the forerunner of the Juilliard School, and lecturer at the New School for Social Research (...