Music, the Arts, and Ideas

by Leonard B. Meyer

'In Music, the Arts, and Ideas, ' Leonard B. Meyer uses music as a vantage point to discover patters in the perplexing, fragmented world of twentieth-century culture. The book is concerned with the aesthetics of music and with the relationships between music (and the other arts), ideology, and history--especially as these have shaped contemporary culture. The Postlude, written for this edition, looks back at the predictions made more than twenty-five years ago and speculates about what the coming decades may hold.

Genres: Music, Art, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Dora · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Above my musical pay grade.

[Leonardo]

Discutido en GEB.