Starting from the late Renaissance, efforts to make vocal music
more expressive heightened the power of words, which, in turn, gave
birth to the modern semantics of musical expression. As the
skepticism of seventeenth-century science divorced the acoustic
properties from the metaphysical qualities of music, the door was
opened to dicern the rich links between musical perception and
varied mental faculties. In Tuning the Mind, Ruth Katz and Ruth
HaCohen trace how eighteenth century theoreticians of music
examined anew the role of the arts within a general theory of
knowledge.
As the authors note, the differences between the physical and
emotional dimensions of music stimulated novel conceptions and
empirical inquiries into the old aesthetic queries. Tracing this
development, their opening chapter deals with seventeenth-century
epistemological issues concerning the artistic qualities of music.
Katz and HaCohen show that painting and literature displayed a
comparable tendency toward "musicalization," whereby the dynamic of
forms-the modalities specific to each artistic medium-rather than
subject matter was believed to determine expression. Katz and
HaCohen explore the ambiguities inherent in idealization of an art
form whose mimetic function has always been problematic. They
discuss the major outlines of this development, from Descartes to
Vico through Condillac. Particular emphasis is placed on
eighteenth-century British thinkers, from Shaftesbury to Adam
Smith, who perceived these problems in their full complexity. They
also explore how the French and the Germans dealt differently with
questions that preoccupied the British, each nation in accordance
with their own past tradition and tendencies. The concluding
chapter summarizes the parallel development of abstract art and
basic hypotheses concerning the mind and explores basic theoretical
questions pertaining to the relationship between perception and
cognition.
In addressing some of the most complex problems in musical
aesthetics, Katz and HaCohen provide a unique historical
perspective on the ways their art creates and develops coherent
worlds, and, in so doing, contribute to our understanding of the
workings of the mind.
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