Summary
Žarko Paić: Why music?
In a post-digital world, where silence disappears in the noise of a continuous flow of data, music confronts us with the question: do we still listen, and if so, what do we hear at all?
"Freedom without love is empty, just as love is mute without the ecstatic power of music", writes Žarko Paić in the symbolically titled collection of essays Why Music?. Starting from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, through Wagner, Mahler, Adorno and Jankélévitch, Paić does not try to define music, but thinks of it as the most sublime metaphysical form of art.
Not as an ornament to existence, but as the ineffable that gives it meaning. Why music? intelektualno je zahtjevno, ali duboko nadahnjujuće štivo. It is a journey through the ideological layers of German romanticism: where art takes on a religious dimension, music reaches the status of the absolute, and the idea of a comprehensive work of art opens up space for a new understanding of the world.
It is a contemplative study that poses a serious question to a society that, in the noise of modern times, has lost the ability to listen.
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