A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Full of delightful nuggets' Guardian online 'Entertaining, informative and philosphical ... An essential read' All About History 'Extraordinary range ... All the world and more is here' Evening Standard 165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago came the first melody. 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet it is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages - from Bach to BTS and back - to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, from global history to our everyday lives, from insects to apes, humans to artificial intelligence. 'Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible: a Guns, Germs and Steel for music' Daniel Levitin 'A thrilling exploration of what music has meant and means to humankind' Ian Bostridge

The five composers represented in this series sit at the core of the Western art-music tradition, and have received an enormous amount of critical and scholarly attention. Beethoven and Schubert worked at the cusp between the Classical style and Romanticism; Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin formed part of what Charles Rosen called 'The Romantic Generation', a group of composers born around 1810 who could be said to have invented musical modernity. Each of the five volumes in this series focuses on the work of one of the four selected composers, and the volume editors have been tasked to throw their nets as widely as possible, in order to capture not just the latest scholarly perspectives on this music, but also older, perhaps less fashionable, but arguably still invaluable literature. Priority has been given to items in English, but a few seminal contributions appear either in a foreign language or in new, previously unpublished translations. Extended introductions also situate the contents of individual volumes in broad scholarly contexts. This major reference series is a substantial addition to scholarly research into the work of the Early Romantic composers, providing increased access to the published literature for scholars and students and an invaluable reference source for libraries.

Our image of Beethoven has been transformed by the research generated by a succession of scholars and theorists who blazed new trails from the 1960s onwards. This collection of articles written by leading Beethoven scholars brings together strands of this mainly Anglo-American research over the last fifty years and addresses a range of key issues. The volume places Beethoven scholarship within a historical and contemporary context and considers the future of Beethoven studies.

The experience of music is abstract and elusive enough that we're often forced to describe it using analogies to other forms and sensations: we say that music moves or rises like a physical form; that it contains the imagery of paintings or the grammar of language. In these and countless other ways, our discussions of music take the form of metaphor, attempting to describe music's abstractions by referencing more concrete and familiar experiences. Michael Spitzer's Metaphor and Musical Thought uses this process to create a unique and insightful history of our relationship with music. Treating issues of language, aesthetics, semiotics, and cognition, Spitzer offers an evaluation, a comprehensive history, and an original theory of the ways our cultural values have informed the metaphors we use to address music. As he brings these discussions to bear on specific works, what emerges is a clear and engaging guide to both the philosophy of musical thought and the history of musical analysis, from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Beethoven's late style is the language of his ninth symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last piano sonatas and string quartets, the Diabelli Variations, the Bagatelles, as well as five piano sonatas, five string quartets, and several smaller piano works. Historically, these works are seen as forging a bridge between the Classical and Romantic traditions: in terms of their musical structure, they continue to be regarded as revolutionary.

Spitzer's book examines these late works in light of the musical and philosophical writings of the German intellectual Theodor Adorno, and in so doing, attempts to reconcile the conflicting approaches of musical semiotics and critical theory. He draws from various approaches to musical, linguistic, and aesthetic meaning, relating Adorno to such writers as Derrida, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as contemporary music theorists. Through analyses of Beethoven's use of specific musical techniques (including neo-Baroque fugues and counterpoint), Spitzer suggests that the composer's last works offer a philosophical and musical critique of the Enlightenment, and in doing so created the musical language of premodernism.