Music and the Forms of Life

Lawrence Kramer

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English

University of California Press
27 December 2022

Theory of music & musicology; Music reviews & criticism; Philosophy of language; Literary studies: general

Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. Music and the Forms of Life examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life.

The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's Goldberg Variations to the genetic code.

By: Lawrence Kramer
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 318g
ISBN: 9780520389113
ISBN 10: 0520389115
Pages: 204
Publication Date: 27 December 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor at Fordham University, is the author of The Hum of the World and The Thought of Music (winner of the ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism), among many other books. He is an award-winning composer whose works have been performed internationally.