The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, or an inescapably embodied human practice, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. In turn, musicians of all stripes have called on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement, and scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into music and into the worlds that sustain it. In this Handbook, contributors build on this legacy to conceptualize the rich interactions of Western music and philosophy as a series of meeting points between two vital spheres of human activity. They draw together key debates at the intersection of music studies and philosophy, offering a field-defining overview while also forging new paths. Chapters cover a wide range of musics and philosophies, including concert, popular, jazz, and electronic musics, and both analytic and continental philosophy.

Tomás McAuley is Assistant Professor of Music and Ad Astra Fellow at University College Dublin. Previously, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship) and Indiana University, and from 2010 to 2018 served as Founding Chair of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group. He is author of The Music of Philosophy: German Idealism and Musical Thought, from Kant to Schelling, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Nanette Nielsen is Associate Professor at the University of Oslo. She joined Oslo in January 2015, after having been Associate Professor and Lecturer at the University of Nottingham (2009-15) and at the University of East Anglia (2005-9). Nielsen works on music and philosophy, especially intersections between ethics and aesthetics, on film music, opera and music criticism in the Weimar republic, and on Scandinavian music and culture. Her publications include the co-written book Music and Ethics (2012), the article 'Ernst Krenek's "problem of freedom" in Jonny spielt auf' (Twentieth-Century Music, 2013) - for which she won the 2014 Jerome Roche Prize - and the monograph Paul Bekker's Musical Ethics (2017). Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Maryland and Past President of the American Society for Aesthetics, 2001-2003. He is the author of five collections of essays, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990, 2nd ed. 2010), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), Contemplating Art (2006), Musical Concerns (2015), and Aesthetic Pursuits (2016), plus a monograph, Music in the Moment (1998). Levinson is also editor of Aesthetics and Ethics (1998), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (2003), and Suffering Art Gladly (2013), as well as co-editor of Aesthetic Concepts (2001) and Art and Pornography (2012). Ariana Phillips-Hutton is a Visiting Lecturer in Music at the University of Cambridge. Her research centres on the philosophy, performance, and politics of contemporary music, with specialisations in memory, violence, and conflict transformation. Recent publications include journal articles in Twentieth-Century Music, Popular Music, and the Journal of the British Academy, and she is also the author of Music Transforming Conflict (2020).