A Different Story

Wide-ranging across time and space, written in jargon-free, plain language, Aesthetics and the History of Western Music, simply put, teaches. The spectrum of original sources is impressively broad, and all of the principal 'usual suspects' are included. But perhaps more important, Olle Edström likewise incorporates the work of writers outside the mainstream of established aesthetics discourse; and the same holds for the secondary sources that he cites and invariably reads critically. Much of the value of this book develops from Edström's concern to move aesthetics from an exercise of language to one of musical practices, and to include not only the music of high art but that of the popular as well, both in past times and in our own. His achievement is noteworthy. Richard Leppert (University of Minnesota).