Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer

In the humanities great scholars tend to be either epistemologists or metaphysicians, realists or idealists, codifiers or innovators. Leonard B. Meyer stands as an anomaly in this company, for within the realm of musicology his work is at once pragmatic and imaginative. An astonishing blend of intellectual depth and breadth, his five books and numerous essays have covered all the major fields of the discipline-not only theory, analysis, criticism, and aesthetics, but also twentieth-century culture, psychology, the nature of science versus the study of the humanities, and most recently, a refined historical theory explaining style change in the music of the nineteenth century. All of the essays in this celebratory volume reveal their affinity with and influence of Leonard Meyer's work; their widely variegated army bears witness to the catholicity of his thought and the ubiquity of its impact --From the Introduction by the editors