Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture

by Leonard B. Meyer

Meyer makes a valuable statement on aesthetics, criteria for assessing great works of music, compositional practices and theories of the present day, and predictions of the future of Western culture. His postlude, written for the book's twenty-fifth anniversary, looks back at his thoughts on the direction of music in 1967.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Art

349 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Dora]

A very interesting discussion about style, about why we listen to music, about pattern recognition in arts. It studies serial music in specific and the Western arts of the twentieth century in general. And it does it in a complex way, looking at issues from different angles, posing pertinent and interesting questions.
The main theme of the book is basically the question of what is the future of arts going to be like - static creation or a completely new phenomenology. And there are of course many opinions, but with macro parallels with different sciences and language, and micro parallels within the arts itself, the author tries to answer in a way that highlights the formality of style and the intricacies of its layers. Interesting discussion and still current.

[John Jr.]

Quite thought-provoking when I read it, which was years ago, and probably still is. Might look for it in a library and flip through it as a reminder. This is where I learned, among other things, about stochastic processes. “Stochastic” is sometimes used as though it were synonymous with “random,” but it isn’t exactly, and Meyer, as I recall, uses the concept in analyzing music, which is both patterned and unpredictable.

[David deBruyn]

Above my musical pay grade.

[Leonardo]

Discutido en GEB.