Music is a higher revelation…

Abstract

Reviews the books Bad vibrations: The history of the idea of music as a cause of disease by James Kennaway (2012), Brain and Music by Stefan Koelsch (2012), Musical imaginations: multidisciplinary perspectives on creativity, performance, and perception edited by David Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell and Raymond Macdonald (2011) and Helmholtz Musicus. Die Objektivierung Der Musik Im 19. Jahrhundert Durch Helmholtz‘ Lehre Von Den Tonempfindungen by Matthias Rieger (2006). In the first book a vast amount of literature of how the idea meanders through history that music is a pathogen as a genuine threat to the health of musicians and their listeners, and both a challenge and a threat to any society trying to uphold order is described in meticulous detail and drawing. The second book displays the relationships between cultural achievements in music and certain brain functions in a very systematic manner and with discussion supported by many references. In the third book the pleasure to measure on creativity, performance, and perception can be found, confirming that musical imagination and creativity are amongst the most abstract and complex aspects of musical behavior. It has been discussed both theoretically and methodologically, to the point where these topics van be grasped. The final book unites the border areas of the sciences which are quite separate, namely on the one hand the border regions of physical and physiological acoustics and on the other hand musicology and aesthetics. The book marks a change in spiritual life when the loss of proportionality as a guiding principle must give way to a scientific and objective understanding of music and it serves as an exemplary illustration for the development of a history of measuring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)