Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780754600879)

'In a word, I shall endeavour to show how our music, having been originally a shell-fish, with its restrictive skeleton on the outside and no soul within, has been developed by the inevitable laws of evolution, through natural selection and the survival of the fittest, into something human, even divine, with the strong, logical skeleton of its science inside, the fair flesh of God-given beauty outside, and the whole, like man himself, animated by a celestial, eternal spirit....' W.J. Henderson, The Story of Music (1889) Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century Britain was permeated with metaphor and analogy. Music and Metaphor examines how over-arching theories of music history were affected by reference to various figurative linguistic templates adopted from other disciplines such as art, religion, politics and science. Each section of the book discusses a wide range of musicological writings and their correspondence with the language used to convey contemporary ideas such as the sublime, the ancient and modern debate, and, in particular, the theory of evolution. Bennett Zon reveals that through their application of metaphorical frameworks taken from art, religion and science, these writers and their work shed light on nineteenth-century perceptions of music history and illuminate the ways in which these disciplines affected notions of musical development.

Author: Bennett Zon
ISBN-10: 0754600874
ISBN-13: 9780754600879
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 11/28/2000
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d

About the Author
Bennett Zon is Senior Lecturer in Music at the The School of Music, Durham University. He is the author of The English Plainchant Revival (OUP, 1998) and editor of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies (Ashgate, 1999).