Karol Berger Is Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous studies in the history of music aesthetics and theory, vocal pholyphony from 1400 to 1600, and instrumental music from 1780 to 1850. His Musica Ficta (1987) won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.

Berger writes well, is suggestive and in places, particularly in relation to music and the nature of poetic forms, genuinely illuminating. As a book for generally interested non-specialists it is genuinely engaging and worth reading

• Prologue. The Function and value of art Part I. Aesthetics: the end of artworks 1.: Aesthetics I. The nature of art 2.: Aesthetics II. The uses of art 3.: Aesthetics III. The genealogy of modern European art music Part II. Poetics and hermeneutics: the contents and interpretation of artworks 4.: Poetics I. Diegesis and mimesis: the poetic modes and the matter of artistic presentation 5.: Poetics II. Narrative and lyric: the poetic forms and the object of artistic presentation 6.: Hermenetics. Interpretation and its validity Epilogue. The power of taste Notes