Music And Morals
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: Twelfth Edition
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the crossroads of aesthetic philosophy and moral inquiry stands Music and Morals, the landmark Victorian treatise by the Reverend H. R. Haweis — a work that dared to ask what music truly does to the human soul. With evangelical conviction and wide-ranging erudition, Haweis argues that music is not merely an art form but a profound moral force, capable of elevating or degrading the character of a civilization. Ranging from an examination of ancient musical traditions to a passionate defense of great composers such as Bach, Handel, and Beethoven, the text presents a sweeping portrait of Western musical culture and its ethical dimensions. Haweis writes with the vigour of a preacher and the sensitivity of a genuine music lover, and his prose carries a rhetorical warmth that made this volume a Victorian bestseller — running to twelve editions and cementing its place as a cornerstone of 19th-century writing on musical aesthetics. The work illustrates the Victorian tendency to bind artistic experience to questions of social virtue, anticipating later debates in musicology and cultural criticism. For anyone curious about how an entire era understood the relationship between art and morality, this remarkable volume poses a question that still resonates: can the music we listen to make us better — or worse — human beings?
Author: H. R. Haweis
Format: Hardback
Published: 1883, W. H. Allen & Co.
Genre: Music
Edition: Twelfth Edition
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the crossroads of aesthetic philosophy and moral inquiry stands Music and Morals, the landmark Victorian treatise by the Reverend H. R. Haweis — a work that dared to ask what music truly does to the human soul. With evangelical conviction and wide-ranging erudition, Haweis argues that music is not merely an art form but a profound moral force, capable of elevating or degrading the character of a civilization. Ranging from an examination of ancient musical traditions to a passionate defense of great composers such as Bach, Handel, and Beethoven, the text presents a sweeping portrait of Western musical culture and its ethical dimensions. Haweis writes with the vigour of a preacher and the sensitivity of a genuine music lover, and his prose carries a rhetorical warmth that made this volume a Victorian bestseller — running to twelve editions and cementing its place as a cornerstone of 19th-century writing on musical aesthetics. The work illustrates the Victorian tendency to bind artistic experience to questions of social virtue, anticipating later debates in musicology and cultural criticism. For anyone curious about how an entire era understood the relationship between art and morality, this remarkable volume poses a question that still resonates: can the music we listen to make us better — or worse — human beings?