Hannah Arendt and the Ansermet's Foundations of Music

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection, we came across this copy of Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine, which translates to The Foundations of music in human consciousness.

The work of Ernest Ansermet, the prestigious leader of the Ballets Russes from 1915 to 1923 and founder of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine captures Ansermet's use of the phenomenology of German philosopher Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl to formulate a holistic approach to music that blends physiology, mathematics, and history, among other disciplines.

The crux of Ansermet's theory is the notion of the phenomenology of auditory consciousness, which denies any attempt to understand music as an object (from without) and instead promotes one that seeks to understand it as a subject (from within.)

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

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