Bøker av Robin Maconie

This collection of essays addresses technical developments in telecommunications and sound recording that have guided the direction of musical aesthetics in the post-1950 era. Such information is readily available online but may appear counterintuitive to many who find its priorities difficult to grasp from a musical perspective. The author hopes to draw attention to the place of ideas of communication and flight in western tradition. This Element begins with Varese and his 'noble noise', traverses the arrival of Information Theory and its influence, examples of early computer music, and ends with a defence of the sublime logic of Stockhausen's singing helicopters and tornados.

In Musicologiameaning musical reasoning as distinct from a mere love of musicauthor and composer Robin Maconie takes aim against the fashionable misconception that music is empty of meaning, or auditory cheesecake. Fresh and penetrating insights draw attention to the influence of musical analogy in the history of science and philosophy from ancient Greece to modern times. Since music has always existed, it is an expression of human consciousness. The discoveries of Pythagoras, Zeno, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein would not have been possible without a tradition of musical acoustics. The story of Musicologia unfolds in thirty-one chapters from primordial considerations of silence, communication, selfhood, balance, and motion to focus on more recent and specific issues of chaos, order, relativity, and artificial intelligence, showing that even the most controversial aspects of modern art music form part of a wider endeavor to engage with universal propositions of science and philosophy.