'… has been explored by other writers before Chua, but he gives it an extra twist by setting it in the larger and longer story of Western civilisation's 'disenchantment'.' BBC Music Magazine

This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
On the preface
Part I. The Garden of Eden: 1. On history
2. On modernity
3. On disenchantment
4. On division
5. On opera
6. On machines
7. On space
8. On style
Part II. The Fruit of Knowledge: 9. On being
10. On the mind
11. On biology
12. On the body
13. On the soul
14. On morality
15. On women
16. On masculinity
17. On independence
18. On heroes
19. On politics
20. On nothing
21. On God
22. On infinity
23. On self-deification
24. On invisibility
25. On conscious life-forms
26. On artificiality
Part III. The Tower of Babel: 27. On death
28. On absolute music
29. On the beautiful and the sublime
30. On monuments
31. On the apocalypse
32. On the end
33. On suicide
34. On absolute drivel
35. On Babel
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Music [AV]