Book NOT finished: Musical Forces
04/08/2014
This book looked promising; I am always interested to hear someone who is offering a new way of looking at things, a new angle, a new approach.
Unfortunately I was not able to to find that interest here. The general concept is understandable, but the author's efforts to explain his concepts are couched in technical terms outside my experience, and use written musical notation, which I have never really learned. Consequently I was unable to follow his examples except in general terms. It did seem to me that there was a drive to prove in a technical way what seems obvious in a subjective way. In the end, I didn't get to it. I have to say, this is VERY rare for me, perhaps five books in my life. |
I was interested to find the author was concerned to point out the role of analogy and metaphor in our descriptions of music, an approach he credited to an academic supervisor, Douglas R. Hofstadter, three of whose books I own*, and who I greatly admire as an author and thinker.
*Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0-465-02656-7) (1979)
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0-465-03091-2 and ISBN 0-553-01412-9) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) 1981
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, co-authored with Emmanuel Sander (ISBN 0465018475) (first published in French as L’Analogie. Cœur de la pensée; published in English in the US in April 2013)
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0-465-03091-2 and ISBN 0-553-01412-9) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) 1981
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, co-authored with Emmanuel Sander (ISBN 0465018475) (first published in French as L’Analogie. Cœur de la pensée; published in English in the US in April 2013)
Read as an e-book borrowed from Auckland Libraries via Overdrive, on my Kobo Touch e-reader