Overview

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensible relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.  

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9780226425979

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Reviews

Intertwining musicology with cultural and intellectual history, Ruth Katz produces an almost unnervingly brilliant philosophical history of sound. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber, Katz is able to draw upon semiotics--as Weber was not--to understand musical rationalization. Reconstructing Western music as a signifying system without concrete referent, A Language of Its Own inserts music analysis into contemporary debates about culture and social theory. --Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University

This book is the crowning achievement of a first-rate scholar, drawing on decades of intensive as well as extensive expertise. The perspective it offers on Western art music is not just exceptionally well informed but also thoroughly original. Scholars in generations to come will find it an invaluable document of how scholars working at the end of the Western canonic paradigm viewed that paradigm. (Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University)

"""This book is the crowning achievement of a first-rate scholar, drawing on decades of intensive as well as extensive expertise. The perspective it offers on Western art music is not just exceptionally well informed but also thoroughly original. Scholars in generations to come will find it an invaluable document of how scholars working at the end of the Western canonic paradigm viewed that paradigm."" (Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Brown University)"""

Author Information

Ruth Katz is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor Emerita of Musicology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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