Publisher's Synopsis
Hardly any question in cultural history has been discussed more controversially and passionately than the relationship between music and emotion. And no emotion has been more associated with music than love. "If music be the food of love, play on" from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is probably the most famous opening sentence in English literature. The subtle play with the permeable boundary between praise of God and eros is already inherent in the unearthly beauty of the medieval monophony. 1000 years later, film music will search for sounding ciphers of human emotional life in all its ramifications. In this way, music and love shake hands in a history of sounds and human emotions that has been intertwined for more than a thousand years and are conditioned by specific contexts. With all the changes in aesthetics and poetics in the enormous cultural-historical span between the Middle Ages and the present, the seven contributions in the volume ask from different perspectives how sound and human feeling are and are mutually dependent, using the example of love.
