Musical Vitalities
Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music
240 pages
|
3 halftones, 21 line drawings
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6 x 9
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© 2018
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
1 Reanimating Musical Organicism
2 Formalism’s Flower
3 Schopenhauer’s Musical Ecology
4 The Floral Poetics of Schumann’s Blumenstück, op. 19
5 Music between Reaction and Response
6 On Not Letting Sounds Be Themselves
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
1 Reanimating Musical Organicism
2 Formalism’s Flower
3 Schopenhauer’s Musical Ecology
4 The Floral Poetics of Schumann’s Blumenstück, op. 19
5 Music between Reaction and Response
6 On Not Letting Sounds Be Themselves
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
Kirsten Paige | Journal of the American Musicological Society
"In Musical Vitalities, Holly Watkins invites her readers to vegetate. . . Building a philosophy of musical form and meaning around the idea of music’s vitality, Watkins brings humanistic and scientific approaches to bear on the question of how the aesthetic realm, and specifically music, exposes cross-species biological commonalities. . . . Musical Vitalities is imaginative and stimulating in its nuanced rethinking of relationships among music, consciousness, and the nonhuman."
Alexander Rehding, Harvard University
“A post-humanist organicism? A formalism fit for the Anthropocene? Watkins shows that these are not contradictions—far from it. Musical Vitalities makes a timely case for the contemporary relevance of Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and Darwin. This is the urgent aesthetic manifesto for ecomusicology that we have been waiting for.”
Berthold Hoeckner, University of Chicago
“This audacious book revisits the rich relationship between music and nature so central to Romantic aesthetics. . . . Beautifully written and punctuated with eclectic analyses of works ranging from Schumann to John Luther Adams, Musical Vitalities uncovers important, indeed vital, connections between nineteenth-century ideals of music and post-humanist conceptions of life.”
Scott Burnham, City University of New York
“With rare generosity and an exhilarating abundance of ideas, Holly Watkins reanimates long dismissed organicist concepts of music in this bracing synthesis of nature and culture, physis and poiesis, science and aesthetics. The result is the fullest measure yet taken of music’s vitality in the bountiful worlds within us and around us.”
Aaron S. Allen, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
“Expertly researched and beautifully written, Musical Vitalities reaches beyond musicology in innovative and provocative ways. It stands to make a lasting contribution to interdisciplinary dialogue.”
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