{"product_id":"music-and-the-forms-of-life-9780520389113","title":"Music and the Forms of Life","description":"Inventors in the age of the Enlightenment created lifelike androids capable of playing music on real instruments. \u003ci\u003eMusic and the Forms of Life\u003c\/i\u003e examines the link between such simulated life and music, which began in the era's scientific literature and extended into a series of famous musical works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music invented auditory metaphors for the scientific elements of life (drive, pulse, sensibility, irritability, even metabolism), investigated the affinities and antagonisms between life and mechanism, and explored questions of whether and how mechanisms can come to life. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The resulting changes in the conceptions of both life and music had wide cultural resonance at the time, and those concepts continued to evolve long after. A critical part of that evolution was a nineteenth-century shift in focus from moving androids to the projection of life in motion, culminating in the invention of cinema. Weaving together cultural and musical practices, Lawrence Kramer traces these developments through a collection of case studies ranging from classical symphonies to modernist projections of waltzing specters by Mahler and Ravel to a novel linking Bach's \u003ci\u003eGoldberg Variations\u003c\/i\u003e to the genetic code. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLawrence Kramer\u003c\/b\u003e, Distinguished Professor at Fordham University, is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Hum of the World\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Thought of Music\u003c\/i\u003e (winner of the ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism), among many other books. He is an award-winning composer whose works have been performed internationally.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of California Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50388835827986,"sku":"9780520389113","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_9480a0b6-15a9-41ce-8bc8-0790a5af1b53.jpg?v=1728909687","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/music-and-the-forms-of-life-9780520389113","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}