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Article: Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning.(Review)
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- Article date:
- December 1, 2000
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Music Library Association, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. By Daniel K. L. Chua. (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [xii, 314 p. ISBN 0-521-63181-5. $64.95.]
Not so long ago, the idea of absolute music functioned to legitimate music academies who were trained to deal only with "the music itself." Defined as music without any extramusical associations, absolute music required its own professional specialists. That tendency having been pushed to its extreme, it has now emerged as its opposite, so that the study of autonomous art music is currently justified by the way it can be related to extramusical concerns. For ...