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In the disastrous years before and during the Second World War, when confidence in a harmonious future was as difficult as it was crucial for spiritual survival, two German artists in exile wrote what would become their late masterpieces. The composer Paul Hindemith conceived an opera on the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler s mature life and theories, The Harmony of the World; the poet and novelist Hermann Hesse wrote a complex literary collage, The Glass Bead Game. Both works address the topic of universal harmony in the fabric of creation and culture, as well as the urgent problem of how such harmony can heal the spiritual, mental, and emotional developments of individuals and of society at large. The two quests are mirrored into circumstances that are almost equidistant from the mid-20th-century period in which their stories are being told Hindemith s opera centers on an outstanding intellectual in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, while Hesse s work focuses on this intellectual s counterpart projected into a fictional world of the early 23rd century. In both cases, the quest for harmony and truthful proportion manifests at all levels of the stories told and of the works telling them. Siglind Bruhn s thought-provoking interdisciplinary study is organized along the lines of the seven areas in which scholars of the Pythagorean tradition from Plato to Kepler and beyond found universal harmony paradigmatically realized music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (the quadrivium of the medieval liberal arts) complemented by metaphysics, psychology, and art. ... Read more

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A contemplative discussion of the connections between music study, world cultures, and cosmology
Musicologist, concert pianist, and interdisciplinary scholar Siglind Bruhn presents The Musical Order Of The World: Kepler, Hesse, Hindemith, a contemplative discussion of the connections between music study, world cultures, and cosmology, particularly as researched by great scientific minds. Covering topics from "Music's Moral Power in Ancient China and Hesse's Castalia" to "The Eternal Realm of Numerical Relations", to an extremely close reading of Kepler's poetry concerning the meaning of death. The Musical Order Of The World is a thoughtful and perfectly attuned blend of advanced music study, ground-breaking scholarship, and metaphysical awareness.
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Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more