An Aesthetics of the Popular Arts

Book excerpt: During the age of Enlightenment music aestheticians first became actively interested in the relationship between music and numerous other branches of intellectual activity. By the late nineteenth century, however, there had been a proliferation of sophisticated musicological research techniques by positivists primarily preoccupied with scientific concepts of music as sound. Such an approach tended to detach music from its cultural and social environment. Throughout the twentieth century numerous theories on music aesthetics have returned to concepts of musical meaning and communication that were common practice during the Enlightenment. To avoid becoming defunct, music aesthetics has had to move in new directions to cope with the changing and diverse phenomena of musical experience in contemporary society. An aesthetic evaluation of popular music as an 'art' form undoubtedly demands the formulation of some aesthetic theory. -- from http://www.jstor.org (Feb. 3, 2014).