What exactly did Beethoven compose? That is the question I will begin with . Well, for one, Beethoven composed a quintet for piano and winds (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn) in E-flat
Aesthetics emerged as an articulate branch of philosophy in the eighteenth century, and the study of music was made part of it by the Abb´e Charles Batteux who, in Les beaux-arts r
A thorough survey of the views of Western philosophers and theologians on the connection between music and the moral life, with special attention given to the ancient Greeks, the C
Philosophy of music is the study of fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it. Like any “philosophy of X”, it presupposes knowledge of its
Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beau
Philosophical reflection on music goes back in the West at least as far as the Pythagoreans and Plato, and has undergone an exceptionally fertile period within analytic philosophy
The subject of sacred music has always been very close to Our heart. Hence it has seemed appropriate to us in this encyclical letter to give an orderly explanation of the topic and
Among the cares of the pastoral office, not only of this Supreme Chair, which We, though unworthy, occupy through the inscrutable dispositions of Providence, but of every local chu
Philosophically music is puzzling. It cannot simply be identified with sound, in part because music often includes silences but also because sounds are simply auditory phenomena whereas music essentially involves tonality creating such features as melody, harmony, direction, and expression. Sounds may indicate their causes (e.g. the ‘ting’ of a bell) but they do not mean them, whereas music carries various kinds of significance principally emotional meaning. The origins of music probably lie in tapping stones to signal or blowing horns as a warning, but out of this developed composition and performance detached from practical purposes and enjoyed for their aesthetic qualities.