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This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approaches), and a range of cognate disciplines (such as critical theory and intellectual history). The Handbook includes, but does not confine itself to, consideration of key questions in aesthetics and the philosophy of music. Each essay provides an introduction to its topic, an assessment of past scholarship, and a research-driven argument for the future of the research area in question. Taken together, these essays provide a current snapshot of this field and outline an abundance of ways in which it might develop in the future.
Sein oder Schein? Paul Bekker's "Mirror Image" and the Ethical Voice of Humane Opera {nanette nielsen} One of the most important music critics of the early twentieth century, Paul Eugen Max Bekker was born in Berlin on September 11, 1882, to a tailor and a seamstress. After a career as a violinist and a short stint as a musical director, he began his journalistic profession in 1906. He initially worked for the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten and the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1911, his book on Beethoven was published and was very well received. This earned him the position, beginning in that year, of music critic at the Frankfurter Zeitung: one of the first such positions in Germany. 1 As a critic and theorist, Bekker produced more than thirty books, along with numerous other publications, including Das deutsche Musikleben (1916), Franz Schreker, Studie und Kritik der modernen Oper (1919), Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (1921), and Wagner, das Leben im Werke (1924). As Intendant in Kassel (1925-27) and Wiesbaden (1927-32), he was responsible for many performances and produced several operas, including Krenek's Jonny spielt auf, Schreker's Der singende Teufel, and Weill's Die Bürgschaft. Bekker left Germany in 1933 and lived in New York, where he was a critic for the New Yorker Staatszeitung, from 1934 until his untimely death on March 7, 1937. Only a handful of his books have appeared in English translation, and many of his theories of music's role in society have yet to be introduced to non-German readers. 2 In a letter of August 24, 1929 to his close friend and colleague Leo Kestenberg, 3 Bekker commented on the link between theory and practice in his work: if, as a writer, he had been in danger of becoming wholly lost in abstraction, his theater work had put him in touch with concrete reality. 4 Although his practical commitment necessitated a retreat from active engagement as a critic, Bekker described this "silence" as an "inner gathering together [of experience]" [inneres Ansammeln], and believed that he was able instead to offer something unique in terms of performance and staging. His career as Intendant at Kassel and Wiesbaden offered an opportunity to turn into practice his theory of music's power to shape society. When formulating his ideals for operatic production, Bekker expressed a wish to reach more deeply than his contemporaries, to stage opera according to what he
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