Musical Improvisation, Heidegger and the Liturgy - A Journey to the Heart of Hope

This book locates musical improvisation within an ontological framework, which is both scientific and Heideggerian, and ultimately encompasses the whole Christian understanding of reality. Part One deals with historical and cultural issues surrounding musical improvisation. Part Two initiates the author's philosophical and theological proposal that, from the time of foetal and infantile experience, every human person's fundamental integration with reality is inseparable from improvisatory musicality. His argument is interdisciplinary, involving music history, critical musicology, 20th-century continental philosophy, ideas from infancy studies and music therapy, and finally ideas from a Christian theology which is both ecumenical and rooted in the Catholic tradition.