Instruments of Music Theory
$162.30
- Hardcover
256 pages
- Release Date
9 March 2027
Summary
Shows how musical instruments and the sounds they produce are not incidental, but an integral part of music theory.
Many musicians dread music theory: Its rules and diagrams can feel stern and lifeless, far removed from the sounds that make music so thrilling. In this book, Alexander Rehding looks at music theory from a different angle. He argues that the sounds of the instruments on which music theory is demonstrated—starting with the piano in the music classroom—pla…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226856308 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0226856305 |
| Author: | Alexander Rehding |
| Publisher: | The University of Chicago Press |
| Imprint: | University of Chicago Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 256 |
| Release Date: | 9 March 2027 |
| Weight: | 454g |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
| Series: | New Material Histories of Music |
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Critics Review
“Rehding continues his radical quest to rethink what music might be in our digitally saturated, environmentally precarious, and politically fraught moment by showing that even the most apparently pure musical entities abound in technical media, scientific crosscurrents, and aesthetic possibility. With his gift for canon expansion, he populates this book with geniuses and oddballs who understood that instruments are theories made flesh—and that they dwell among us as intensely worldly objects. Think again if you thought music theory was stodgy.”
* John Durham Peters, Yale University *“Rehding has written a delightfully witty book carrying a serious message for music theorists and scholars of media technologies. He has identified a major rupture in the nineteenth century in our received ontological understanding of music initiated by the technological development of new instruments by which musical sounds could be generated. Instruments of Music Theory is a tour de force of learned intellectual history and great storytelling that shows us how music theory has arrived at the digital music age we live in today.”
* Thomas Christensen, University of Chicago *Alexander Rehding
Alexander Rehding is the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is the author of Alien Listening: The Voyager Golden Record and Music from Earth, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany, and Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought.
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