001 | Music, More Fluent than Words (2015)

The most fluent language of all languages, music.

Unlike painting and literature, which are commonly considered reproductive arts, music represented by abstract art, despite its ambiguity and abstraction, Adorno argues that music is an art with more delicate expressive power than any other language.

As Charles Batteux puts it, the music delivered to us through sound touches, conquers, and enforces us with a world of various meanings.

Thirteen papers in the book convey a wide range of discussions on these musical meanings, particularly in the English-American and German-speaking studies published after the 2000s, providing an opportunity to look at recent trends in musical aesthetics.

It is a book that I would like to recommend to music lovers and the general public, undergraduates and graduate students, and musicologists.