Aesthetics and music / Andrew Hamilton.

1. Aesthetics and music in ancient Greece -- Music and mousike, art and techne -- The Pythagorean and Platonic-Pythagorean mathematical conception -- The ethical conception, and Plato's more empirically-minded successors Aristotle and Aristoxenus -- The separation of the value spheres -- Medieval and Renaissance musical thought -- 2. The concept of music -- The possibility of non-musical aural or sound-art -- The concept of music -- Sounds, tones and sound-art -- 3. The aesthetics of form, the aesthetics of expression and 'absolute music' : aesthetics of music in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- The Romantic metaphysics of music -- Kant and formalism -- Hegel : historicism and truth-content -- Schopenhauer and Wagner : absolute music -- Nietzsche : the Apollonian and the Dionysian -- Hanslick and formalism -- Expression, form and absolute music -- 4. The sound of music -- The acousmatic experience of sound -- Pythagoras and musique concrete -- A broader definition of 'acousmatic' -- Objections to the acousmatic thesis -- The twofold thesis -- A humanistic conception of music versus more abstract conceptions -- 5. Rhythm and time -- Music as an art of time -- The universality of rhythm -- A Platonic, organic definition -- Rhythm and metre -- Rhythm and accent -- Rhythm and movement -- 6. Adorno and modernism : music as autonomous and 'social fact' -- The advent of modernism -- Adorno's aesthetics of modernism -- Adorno and Kant : art as autonomous and purposeless -- Adorno and Hegel : dialectic, historicism and truth-content -- Adorno and Marx : art as commodity or social fact -- The culture industry -- Music of the avant-garde : Adorno's limited grounds for optimism -- Dialectics and the autonomy of art -- 7. Improvisation and composition -- The aesthetics of perfection and imperfection -- The concept of improvisation and 'improvised feel' -- Spontaneity and the aesthetics of perfection -- Free improvisers, interpreters and 'improvisation as a compositional method'.