The concept of music

by Robin Maconie

"Maconie makes us look afresh at the elements of music, examining how the development of modes and scales, keyboards, even the details of sharps and flats, can each be linked to changes in the way the world is perceived and understood. He shows how traditional ideas of freedom and order are reflected in the laws of melody and harmony; how such knotty issues as the nature of time and the continuity of experience are stated and restated by composers and performing musicians with infinite variation and subtlety of meaning. And there are provocative contentions, that music is in fact a representational art, based like painting and sculpture on the imagery of actual experience: 'an image of what it is like for human beings to be alive'. For Maconie musical repertoire of every kind amounts to a vast resource of social, psychological, and linguistic data still awaiting proper interpretation. Book jacket."--Jacket.