
Length6h 54m
About this audiobook
‘My piano stands in the library. When I practise on it, I often yield to the temptation to glance at a book lurking on a shelf, which usually draws me away from playing and forces me first to read and then immediately afterwards to write. Thinking in music – which is, after all, a non-verbal activity – is hard to conceptualise and far removed from describing things in words. Yet quite often an extended period of wordless thinking, of a kind familiar to the practising musician (and to many a music lover), allows us to succumb to the illusion that we can, precisely through this wordless thinking, grasp some important aspect of human experience in its entirety. We then discover […] that everything is connected. Music is underpinned by mathematical structures, and at the same time it somehow enables sudden brief flashes of insight into the meaning of our lives.’
Anna Chęćka
Audiobook details
GenrePhilosophy
Length6 hrs 54 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateAug 3, 2023
LanguagePolish
Table of contents
1Editorial page
2Introduction
3I A critique of musical reason (part 1)
4Professor JOY
5Witch hunting
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6Philosophical anhedonia
7The Persian carpet and the question of emotion
8II A critique of musical reason (part 2)
9A cure for musicognosis
10Grey matter
11Abbate versus Berger and the Chopin Competition
12I alone as an Other
13The inner record collection
14A critique of life
15The case of little Hanno
16IV Frozen finiteness
17A Larkinian sneer
18‘A stranger I came, a stranger I depart’
19V The metaphysical hearing of Chopin: On the consolation brought by music
20VI Death or birth?
21Musical genesis
22Without beginning, without end
23On the edge
24VII Self-portrait of a listener
25A lesson in ascoltando
26The misprized discourse of touch
27Against an insensitive typology
28Joyous science
29VIII We are all critics. Interpretation as the experience of the foreign
30Fidelity and betrayal
31Disinterested dividends
32The secularisation of Mystery
33IX Are there no true critics left?
34The metacritical perspective
35An examination of conscience
36The ethics of interpretation
37X The competition as a bourse of values, or music put to the test
38The open work
39The success of narcissus
40The competition’s ‘here and now’
41Artistic relativism
42XI ‘I was waiting for a musical messenger’
43XII Anatomy of madness
44An existential thrill
45Ontological security: integrity and distinctness
46Music and trance
47XIII Music and ecstasy, or the fear of flying
48The thrill of emotion and peak experience
49Anatomy of ecstasy
50Mnemosyne and the brain