Alicja Gescinska / Alicja Gescinska – At Home in Music

Alicja Gescinska – At Home in Music

Alicja Gescinska – At Home in Music

Rights sold

  • Siruela (Spain)

 

About the book

Does music improve human beings and their communities? Philosophers have examined that question over many years with great scepticism. Plato warned that music can bring about dangerous changes in society. Centuries later, Adorno pointed to the damaging power of jazz, which he believed made for tame citizens. Alicja Gescinska is convinced that music is more uplifting than it is pernicious. It can play an important part in our personal and moral development. We dwell too little on this nowadays. In schools there is hardly any room left for music, and in daily life we see it mainly as a source of relaxation, distraction or consolation. In her lucid essay, Gescinska demonstrates convincingly that music is more a foundation than an ornament to our existence. Music allows us to come home to ourselves and creates a dwelling place for us in the world.

Alicja Gescinska gives us a lucid and engaging account of this most mysterious of arts, celebrating music and its vital place in our society, while gently introducing us to her very personal philosophy. The result is a delightful treatment of a delightful subject, which all thinking people should read. - Roger Scruton

Author

Alicja Gescinska (b. Warsaw, 1981) is one of the most prominent young philosophers of Belgium and the Netherlands. Her book The Conquest of Freedom (2011) was universally praised. In 1988 she fled communist Poland with her family and settled in Belgium, where she gained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Ghent. She has worked at Princeton University and since 2014 at Amherst College.

 

(c) Koen Broos

Additional book information

  • Literary Essays
  • ISBN 9789403138503
  • Number of pages: 96
  • World rights: De Bezige Bij
  • Price: €19,99
  • English sample available