Books like On The Musically Beautiful

\ \ \ \ Can you tell (guess at) the feelings the Amazonian Indian is going through, while listening to Mozart’s?... what about the goings-on of his imagination? ...pleasurable? or...This book is about the experience of beauty while listening to music; certainly classical music, because it was written by 19th century Czech author/reviewer E. Hanslick. To me, it is a kind of a good seminal work, of which theme today's Psychology of Music and Music Therapy can address a lot better. \ \ \ \ (Eduard Hanslick adulating the statue of Saint Johannes Brahms) By that time, Hanslick was pondering on the aesthetical experience of music, so sui generis an experience (music the most ethereal of the arts!... if you compare it to other arts: sculpture, painting, poetry…).Hanslick was contending against a current of his time: “music as a main arouser of sensations,… or feelings”. Take a look at this elucidating quote:"THE CONNECTION BETWEEN A PIECE OF MUSIC AND OUR CHANGES OF FEELING IS NOT AT ALL ONE OF STRICT CAUSATION;...Evidence for this is the extraordinary difference between the reactions of Mozart's,Beethoven's, and Weber's contemporaries to their compositions and our own reaction today. How many works by Mozart were declared in his time to be the most passionate,ardent,and audacious within the reach of musical mood-painting. At that time people contrasted the tranquility and wholesomeness of Haydin's symphonies with the outbursts of vehement passion, bitter struggle,and piercing agony of Mozart's.Twenty or thirty years later,they made exactely the same comparison between Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart's position as representative of violent, inspired passion was taken over by Beethoven, and Mozart was promoted to Haydn's Olympian classicism....THUS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MUSICAL WORKS AND SPECIFIC FEELINGS DOES NOT APLLY ALWAYS, IN EVERY CASE AND NECESSARILY,AS AN ABSOLUTE IMPERATIVE".To him music was directly linked to the arousal of “states of mind”, being “imagination” (the organ of pure contemplation) the function at stake.It sounds a bit of “internal viewing” and there are those who defend that through music you can have access to colors and landscapes: sinesthesy. Anyway, Hanslick didn’t deny the role of emotions: you can derive knowledge from them; feelings, in their turn, may give rise to images in the mind. One the friends of Hanslick was, for some time, Wagner; but Hanslick revealed to be a conservative; Wagner was innovative: maybe advanced for his time, his music classified as “music of the future”. Later on, they got apart, in different positions…but maybe due to the Jewishness of Hanslick: who thought Wagner’s view becoming increasingly “obscure”. \ \ \ \ (The critic Eduard Hanslick and Richard WagnerSilhouette)The purpose of the book was to clarify the “nexus” that unites musical works and “states of mind”. It reads like a philosophical approach. I see the experience of beauty in music as a rather idiosyncratic, individual issue. My view.