Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
"Writing with grace and clarity...he touches on everything from the evolution of the Western tonal system, to the Freudian theory of music as infantile escapism, to the differing roles o the right and left brain in perceiving music." WALL STREET JOURNAL Drawing on his own life long passion for music and synthesizing the theories of Plato, Schopenhauer, Stravinsky, Nietzsche, Bartok, and others, distinguished author and psychologist Anthony Storr illuminates music's deep beauty and timeless truth and why and how music is one of the fundamental activities of mankind.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Good reference book.
Customer Rating:
I used this book to help me write my senior thesis (rooted in music education). Very helpful reference book and has excellent research about music therapy and autism.
Music and the Mind
Customer Rating:
The book was in great condition and I received it on time.
patchy.not written by a professional musician and it shows
Customer Rating:
Bitterly disappointed in this book.A little bit of knowledge on music can be a dangerous thing and this rambling patchwork quilt of fragments is a pretty dismal affair.There are a handful of people who write well on music (a difficult thing to do)and i'd direct people to the likes of Charles Rosen (serious)and Norman Lebrecht(populist)
Staggering
Customer Rating:
I did not know quite what to expect when i ordered this book. The only reason that i did so was because I needed to write my senior thesis and every applicable book at our library was gone. So, i opted just to buy this.
After about 6 or 7 pages into the book, i knew that i had found something golden. Mr. Storr writes in a way that makes the text incredibly informative, yet still engaging and understandable. While not every aspect of the novel is covered thoroughly, it still will give enough information on almost any topic that you could possibly require.
I highly recommend this book. It has opened my eyes to a world of philosophy that i hadn't even looked at until this time.
I'm sure that you will find this as indispensable as i do.
A good place to start
Customer Rating:
Anthony Storr does a very good job describing the various facets of the complex interplay between music and mind. He points to the biological bases of it, explores the philosophical debates around it and gives acounts of basic music theory. He is a good writer and manages to engage the reader's interest through most of the book. That is very admirable considering the nature of the subject matter and the poor job often done by other writes venturing into similar subjects.
There are however some minor flaws. The connection between the biological foundations of music and western philosophy is a difficult and dubious one and Storr does not really manage to fuse them in a smooth and comprehensive way. They stand aloof and strange to each other. Another flaw is the fact that the book heavily, though not exclusively, draws on classical western music: an admitedly very peculiar and eurocentric kind of music. This leaves out much of the richness of other kinds of music e.x. jazz, folk music, religious music. It also makes his principal endeauvour, to connect music to the mind/body, more difficult. Classical music after all epitomizes the cerebral, distanced and controlled sort of musical apprehension in contrast to folk and popular music which is more expressive and ecstatic. Had he made the opposite methodological choice, folk before classical, he might have had more succes in making the connection between music to the mind/body.
Still the book is an excellent introduction to the topic.
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