Musical Aesthetics

What if musical aesthetics has been entrusted to the wrong guardians?

In Musical Aesthetics, Roberto Barreca argues that the time has come to return aesthetic judgment to those who live music from within: performers. Against abstract formalism, historicist evolutionism, and sociological reductionism, this essay proposes a radically different vantage point, one rooted in phenomenology, psychoanalytic listening, and what the author calls "regional aesthetics".

Music, Barreca contends, does not evolve toward progress, nor does it submit to purely analytical or historical explanation. Each musical work is the representation of a distinct aesthetic region within a parallel universe of beauty. The task of musical aesthetics is not to define music in the abstract, but to answer essential questions: Why is it beautiful? In what way? What world does it reveal?

Engaging critically with figures such as Kant, Hanslick, Croce, Adorno, and Dahlhaus, and entering into dialogue with performers like Glenn Gould, Carlo Maria Giulini, and others, this book challenges the dogmas of historically informed performance and defends an absolutist, ahistorical conception of musical beauty.

Blending philosophical rigor with lived musical experience, Musical Aesthetics invites readers to rethink the meaning of interpretation, the role of the performer, the mystery of beauty, and the possibility of mapping the aesthetic universe itself.

A bold and uncompromising contribution to contemporary philosophy of music.

Roberto Barreca is a musician, philosopher, psychologist, and psychoanalyst.