A History of Western Musical Aesthetics follows through the centuries debates about the place and function of music, the perceived role of music as a good or bad influence on the development of character, as a magical art or a domestic entertainment, and as a gateway to transcendental truths. Edward Lippman describes the beginnings of musical tradition in the myths and philosophies of antiquity. He shows how music theory began to take on new dimensions and intensity in the seventeenth century, how musical esthetics was specifically defined and elaborated in the eighteenth century, and how, by the nineteenth century, music became the standard by which other arts were judged. The twentieth century added problems, pressure, and theories as music continued to diversify and as cultures viewed each other with more respect. - Back cover.

A History of Western Musical Aesthetics follows through the centuries debates about the place and function of music, the perceived role of music as a good or bad influence on the development of character, as a magical art or a domestic entertainment, and as a gateway to transcendental truths. Five parts cover the centuries of sustained modern writing in the field (from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries), whilst a preliminary chapter surveys differences in thought from the Greeks to the Renaissance. The first and second of these periods offer a three-way division, focusing respectively on the establishment of music as a fine art in the sixteenth century together with expression and rhetoric in the seventeenth, and on imitation and expression in the eighteenth, with special reference to operatic aesthetics in both; the third and fourth periods divide nineteenth-century and twentieth-century issues into a fuller four sections, dealing with two stages of romantic thought (titled "Romantic Aesthetics" and "Emotional Realism") and two philosophical aspects (respectively, "Formalism and Autonomism," and "The Idealist Tradition"), leading into much wider-ranging issues in the twentieth century concerning theories of meaning, concepts of form and structure, and the evaluation of the nature of experience and of its context in the subjects of phenonomenology and sociology. - Music Library Association.