Daniel Chua's book promises both a history of absolute music and a more general collection of thoughts linking theorists and composers. The book is organised into short chapters with ideas forming constellations around wide-ranging ideas such as space, nothing, God, infinity and, to use Chua's terminology, 'absolute drivel'.

To examine what he has achieved we will consider two chapters, dealing with Monteverdi and Beethoven. Monteverdi's Orfeo is significant for its contribution to the birth of opera and the early aesthetics of opera. Chua outlines the role of music in Orfeo, as explained by Musica in the prologue and realised by Orfeo in the drama. However, although he cites many of the principal musicological secondary sources, he brings a personal outlook to the work. Ritornello is described by Chua as the 'signification of nothingness', particularly to highlight the loss of Euridice both on Earth (Act II) and in hell (Act IV). The 'signification' Chua talks about here is really the tangible, definable loss Orfeo experiences, articulated through the macro-structure common to most scholarly interpretations of Orfeo. There are ritornellos with different moods, like the choruses. 'The ritornello', says Philip Pickett, 'is capable of projecting almost any emotion'. Chua uses this quotation to claim that the ritornello projects nothing at all.

It would be easy to refute this claim by finding justification for differences of style, orchestration and figuration in ritornellos. However, this would not necessarily undermine the value of Chua's comment, which is dialectical. The benefits of taking Adorno as a model for literary style may not be immediately obvious to the reader, but allow for greater interaction with the ideas discussed.

Discussing the same piece, Chua notes that Monteverdi changes the hexachord from modus mollis to durus 'to symbolize the indifference of an obdurate nature that can only reply with disenchanted echoes of the mountains.' Eric Chafe deals with this section in far more detail (Eric Chafe, Monteverdi's Tonal Language, New York 1992, 154-5). He explains the echoing of the final word of Orfeo's lines with the same sound but a different meaning, e.g.

Orfeo: My words can't express enough of my grief.
Echo: [That's] enough!

This is a dramatic trick, keeping the listener supplied with interest at the same time as representing passionate, and negative, emotions on stage. Chafe's interpretation of the modal switch as part of this drama may be controversial, but Chua does not challenge it: there is little actual criticism in his book. Chafe is constructing meaning from Monteverdi's score, but instead of providing a critique of this interpretation, Chua uses Chafe's views as a basis for his own ideas. These are sometimes a little opaque:

'Orpheus represents the modern ego whose rhetorical sovereignty alienates humanity from nature; and the echo, a symbol of unrequited love, becomes the sound of an unrequited music that returns to itself to leave the world unsung.'

On other occasions, Chua's reticence about criticising other authors is more effective. In a fascinating chapter called On Suicide, Chua recounts Adorno's view of the fatalism in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, a late work. The condemnation of Adorno we expect from Chua does not come in the form of a rebuttal of his specific case concerning the Missa Solemnis; Chua has realised that Adorno's idea is more important than its application to the work in question, and cites Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus: 'This is the moral pose of an intellectual Marxist in despair. How high-mindedly he shits on art!'

There are other passages that help to expand the understanding of the reader, and the author has a very wide range historical span. However, the dialectic literary style and the need to refer to many of the works cited in footnotes to get the best out the book are disadvantageous.

Jack Day