Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past : An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics PDF

<b>A bold, restorative vision of Mozarts works, and Western art music generally, as manifestations of an idealism rooted in the sociable nature of humans.</b>For over a generation now, many leading performers, critics, and scholars of Mozarts music have taken a rejection of transcendence as axiomatic.

This essentially modernist, antiromantic orientation attempts to neutralize the sorts of aesthetic experiences that presuppose an enchantment with Mozarts art, an engagement traditionally articulated by such terms as intention, mimesis, author, and genius. And what is true of much recent Mozart interpretation isoften manifest in the interpretation of Western art music more generally. Edmund Goehrings <i>Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past</i> explores what gets lost when the vocabulary of enchantment is abandoned.

The bookthen proceeds to offer an alternative vision of Mozarts works and of the wider canon of Western art music.

A modernized poetics, Goehring argues, reduces art to mechanism or process.

It sees less because it excludes a necessaryand enlarging human presence: the generative, and receiving, I. This fascinating new book-length essay is addressed to any reader interested in the performing arts, visual arts, and literature and their relationship to the broader culture.

Goehring draws on seminal thinkers in art criticism and philosophy to propose that such works as Mozarts radiate an idealism that has human sociability both as its source and its object. This book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC.