Concept
Philosophy of music
Overview
Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. The expression was born in the 19th century and has been used especially as the name of a discipline since the 1980s.
Some basic questions in the philosophy of music are:
What is the definition of music? (what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for classifying something as music?)
What is the relationship between music and mind?
What is the relationship between music and language?
What does music history reveal to us about the world?
What is the connection between music and emotions? (in the 19th century a debate began over whether purely instrumental music could convey emotions and depict imaginary scenes)
What is meaning in relation to music?
Contributions to music philosophy have been made by philosophers, music critics, musicologists, music theorists, and other scholars.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Again, in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double. But when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the correct performance of airs or metres composed already, which latter is called education, then the difficulty begins, and the good artist is needed. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair and…
Plato, Symposium
States what Philosophy of music is; the author is tied to Philosophy of music in the knowledge graph.
The English call physical instruments, such as the barometer and thermometer, philosophical instruments. Theories too, and especially morality and the moral sciences, which are derived from the feelings of the human heart or from experience, are called Philosophy, and finally this is also so with the theories and principles of Political Economy. And thus at least in England, is the name of Philosophy respected. Some…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Philosophy of music is; the author is tied to Philosophy of music in the knowledge graph.
A book without content is, as every one knows, not a book with empty leaves, but one of which the content is as good as none. We shall find as the last result on closer analysis, that by what is called content an educated mind means nothing but the presence and power of thought. But this is to admit that thoughts are not empty forms without affinity to their content, and that in other spheres as well as in art the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Philosophy of music is; the author is tied to Philosophy of music in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Philosophy of music
Related ideas
- Roger Scruton
- Emotion
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- The World as Will and Representation
- Philosophy
- Immanuel Kant
- Necessity and sufficiency
- Ludwig Tieck
- German Romanticism
- Music
- Metaphysics
- Aesthetics
- Psychology
- Plato
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Intellect
- Harmony
- Steven Pinker
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Melody
- Either/Or (Kierkegaard book)
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.