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A phenomenological study of music that describes the history of musicology from the time of Pythagoras through to the 19th-century movements.

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CHOICE Review

Kimmey attempts nothing less than a systematic survey of the problems of musical knowledge--practical, historical, and speculative--from classical antiquity through the late 19th century. But his book is rather more than a mere recapitulation of "musicology," by which he means any scholarly appraisal of music or its effects. On the contrary, this volume offers music historians a number of cogent observations on how writers from Aristotle to Guido Adler and from Philippe de Vitry to Francois Fetis viewed music, the art of composition, and the practical matters of performance. What interests Kimmey most, it seems, are the philosophical preconceptions that rest behind the various musical outlooks he considers. The bulk of the text is taken up with a chronological survey of ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and 19th-century views of music. But this "retrospective of musicology," as Kimmey calls it, is framed by a more general "phenomenological critique" of the discipline in a philosophical sense: its methods, general limits, and its epistemology. This book does more than summarize the scholastic heritage of musical knowledge; it frames the broader project of self-examination recently proposed by a number of modern musicologists (see, for instance, Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, CH, Sep '85). Upper-division undergraduate and graduate collections. -R. Freedman, Haverford College