Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of
monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are
actually one.
Daniel Albright was one of the preeminent scholars of musical and
literary modernism, leaving behind a rich body of work before his
untimely passing. In Music's Monisms, he shows how musical and
literary phenomena alike can be fruitfully investigated through the lens
of monism, a philosophical conviction that does away with the binary
structures we use to make sense of reality. Albright shows that despite
music's many binaries--diatonic vs. chromatic, major vs. minor, tonal
vs. atonal--there is always a larger system at work that aims to
reconcile tension and resolve conflict.
Albright identifies a "radical monism" in the work of modernist poets
such as T. S. Eliot and musical works by Wagner, Debussy, Britten,
Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Radical monism insists on the
interchangeability, even the sameness, of the basic dichotomies that
govern our thinking and modes of organizing the universe. Through a
series of close readings of musical and literary works, Albright
advances powerful philosophical arguments that not only shed light on
these specific figures but also on aesthetic experience in general.
Music's Monisms is a revelatory work by one of modernist studies' most
distinguished figures.
