Good Music: What It Is & Who Gets to Decide
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- Synopsis
- Over the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of “good” music—highly serious, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly original—and, at the same time, has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals. In Good Music, John J. Sheinbaum explores these traditional models for valuing music. By engaging examples such as Handel oratorios, Beethoven and Mahler symphonies, jazz improvisations, Bruce Springsteen, and prog rock, he argues that metaphors of perfection do justice to neither the perceived strengths nor the assumed weaknesses of the music in question. Instead, he proposes an alternative model of appreciation where abstract notions of virtue need not dictate our understanding. Good music can, with pride, be playful rather than serious, diverse rather than unified, engaging to both body and mind, in dialogue with manifold styles and genres, and collaborative to the core. We can widen the scope of what music we value and reconsider the conventional rituals surrounding it, while retaining the joys of making music, listening closely, and caring passionately.
- Copyright:
- 2018
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 320 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226593418
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780226593241
- Publisher:
- The University of Chicago Press
- Date of Addition:
- 11/16/24
- Copyrighted By:
- The University of Chicago Press
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Social Studies, Music, Philosophy
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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- by John J. Sheinbaum
- in Nonfiction
- in Social Studies
- in Music
- in Philosophy