eBook - ePub

Music and the Forms of Life

Name: Music and the Forms of Life
ISBN: 9780520389120

Lawrence Kramer,

204 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Music and the Forms of Life

Lawrence Kramer,

About this book

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life.

The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's Goldberg Variations to the genetic code.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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Yes, you can access Music and the Forms of Life by Lawrence Kramer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Modern Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.