Written in response to a student’s plea for help (“I’m desperate! I don’t get classical music!”), the book is not stuck in the distant past.
Beginning with patterns, pitches and instruments, author Dennis Bathory-Kitsz covers topics from performers to shrieking singers to the mysterious classical codes, from Beethoven (“the great hulk of a man”) through space music, tone poems, nationalism, and even composers insulting each other. It is a concise and helpful book with humor and insight written by a composer and performer with a lifetime of experience. “Whaaaaaaaaat!? I Don’t Get Classical Music: A Self-Help Desperation Guide” is a tonic for the perplexed, and a companion guide for those who feel classical music is forbidding, complex and grandiose. As a conclusion, the paradox of ‘star music’ is connected to an experience of a shared transcendent meaning of music, which can be present in the moment of a musical performance. The idea of ‘star music’ can be found throughout the history of music and thought in the West, including Plato’s works and that of other ancient philosophers, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic era and the twentieth century up to contemporary New Age music.
By reflexive re-reading of the sources, new insights into the nature of musical consciousness are explored. My research is approached from two angles, namely from the history of ideas and from musicianship, exploring how music is reflected in the world of thought. This ancient state of consciousness was related to a musical understanding of the world, the Pythagorean-Platonic experience of the universe as an ordered cosmos. The ancient Greeks had a holistic form of consciousness, which was continually intermingling with a transpersonal dimension. The idea of ‘star music’ as a paradox can become a gateway to a different understanding of the universe, and a vehicle for a shift to a new – and yet very ancient – form of consciousness. The idea of ‘star music’ contains several potential opposites, including imagination and sense perception, the temporal and the eternal, transcendence and theophany, and others. This thesis regards the ancient Pythagorean-Platonic idea of heavenly harmony as a philosophical paradox: stars are silent, music is not. MPhil Thesis at Canterbury Christchurch University.
In conclusion, he lists what he considers to be musical universals and takes up the more controversial issues implicit in his discussion. The author also discusses the fields of anthropology and psychology, showing how his approach serves as a starting point for studies of perception and the concepts, norms, and values found in specific music cultures. The theoretical concepts which form the basis of Rahn's approach are discussed and applied: first to individual pieces of non-Westem music which have enjoyed a fairly high profile in ethnomusicological literature, and second to repertoires or groups of pieces. Instead he stresses the desirability of formulating a theory to deal with all music, rather than merely Western forms, and emphasizes the need to evaluate an analysis and compare it with other interpretations, and demonstrates how this may be done. In the process, he rejects recent ethnomusicological formulations based on mentalism, cultural determinism, and the psychology of perception as potentially fruitful bases for analysing music in general. Professor Rahn takes the approach to the analysis of Western art music developed recently by theorists such as Benjamin Boretz and extends it to address non-Westem forms.
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