Music as Philosophy

Anyone who knows Michael Spitzer's earlier book, Metaphor and Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2004), will be aware that he is not merely an intellectual person who writes about music with reference to certain philosophical ideas, like most of us. He is an authentic philosopher in the Austro-German tradition, a successor to Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Habermas. The new work began life as his doctoral thesis, which reminds one of Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, a dissertation so advanced that it was failed by the examiners. Spitzer's examiners, fortunately for them, were not so foolish. His text has been adapted and improved in many ways since its first fashioning. The final product, however, must retain some of the features that dazzled its assessors in 1991. There is not merely a confidence and authority in the philosophical grounding; there is also a kind of bravura and exuberance.

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