Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives
Author(s): David Clarke (Author), Eric Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: September 25, 2011
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 410 pages
ISBN-10: 0199553793
ISBN-13: 9780199553792
Book Description
Consciousness has been described as one of the most mysterious things in the universe. Scientists, philosophers, and commentators from a whole range of disciplines can’t seem to agree what it is, or why it is that the whole rich panoply of human experience seems to emerge from a lump of squishy grey matter in our heads. Most agree, though, that consciousness represents a Hard Problem, and consciousness studies has emerged as a quasi-discipline over recent years, as a multidisciplinary discourse seeking to address these and other fascinating and perplexing questions.
While the arts and humanities have joined the sciences at the debating table, music has been relatively under-represented-until now. This book redresses this balance. Its 20 essays offer different takes on issues around music and consciousness, both addressing existing agendas, and introducing new ones. No single view emerges, but what the collection as a whole makes clear is that to understand consciousness we need to do much more than look at brains. Studying music makes it clear that consciousness is as much to do with minds, bodies, culture, and history. The book, which includes several chapters drawing from Eastern philosophies, also provides a corrective to any perception that the study of consciousness is a purely Western preoccupation. In addition to what it says about consciousness, the book also – and perhaps primarily – represents a new configuration of writings about music.
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Consciousness poses major challenges to human understanding. This unique book considers whether music might afford some special source of insight into consciousness, and how issues of consciousness might in turn shape our understanding of music.
About the Author
David Clarke is Professor of Music at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is a music theorist in the broadest sense, interested in analytical, philosophical, and cultural approaches to musical and meaning. These concerns have informed his work on the British composer, Michael Tippett, on whom he is a leading authority and the author of several books and essays. Similar priorities have also shaped his recent research into cultural pluralism and musical postmodernism-which has yielded articles on Eminem, ‘Elvis and Darmstadt’, and BBC Radio 3’s ‘Late Junction’. David Clarke is also a practicing musician-a violinist and conductor, and lately a vocalist in the North Indian khy?l tradition.
Eric Clarke is Heather Professor of Music at Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Wadham College. He has published widely on various issues in the psychology of music, musical meaning, and the analysis of pop music, including Empirical Musicology (OUP 2004, co-edited with Nicholas Cook), Ways of Listening (OUP 2005), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (CUP 2009, co-edited with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink) and Music and Mind in Everyday Life (OUP 2010, co-authored with Nicola Dibben and Stephanie Pitts). He was an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, and is an Associate Director of the successor Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (2009-14). He is on a number of editorial boards, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.
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