Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch's Musical Philosophy [Hardcover]

Korstvedt explains key concepts from Bloch's musical philosophy, making his complex ideas accessible for modern musical scholars.Ernst Bloch's philosophy of music is richly insightful, but often forbidding in its density. This book makes Bloch's musical thought accessible to modern musical scholars by deciphering its conceptual bases. Korstvedt then uses ideas derived from Bloch as the starting point for critical essays on Wagner, Mozart, Bruckner and Brahms.Ernst Bloch's philosophy of music is richly insightful, but often forbidding in its density. This book makes Bloch's musical thought accessible to modern musical scholars by deciphering its conceptual bases. Korstvedt then uses ideas derived from Bloch as the starting point for critical essays on Wagner, Mozart, Bruckner and Brahms.The musical writings of the German philosopher and theorist Ernst Bloch are extraordinarily rich, but also unusually dense, at times even cryptic. Bloch, a profoundly heterodox thinker, brilliantly wove cultural criticism into a larger project of what he termed revolutionary gnosis'. Listening for Utopia is both an explication of Bloch's musical thought and a critical development of it. Ultimately, the book seeks to reanimate Bloch's philosophy of music in ways that connect with current musicology. The work begins with a detailed study of concepts crucial to Bloch's aesthetics that situates them within both his philosophical system and German critical theory of the early twentieth century. The second half of the book comprises a series of essays that take up key ideas from Bloch, decipher them through contextual and close reading, and develop them through critical application to salient musical masterpieces by Wagner, Mozart, Bruckner and Brahms.Preface; Introduction; 1. Bloch's Teppich: an initial approach; 2. On the genealogy of the Teppich: metaphor before Bloch; 3. The conceptual constellation of Bloch's musical philosophy; 4. Entering Bloch's musical system; 5. Wagner's animal lló„