The Doctrine of One: Personal Encounters with Film, Art and Music - cover image

Copyright

Michael Beckerman

Published On

2026-08-19

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-796-4
Hardback978-1-80511-797-1
PDF978-1-80511-798-8
HTML978-1-80511-800-8
EPUB978-1-80511-799-5

Language

  • English

Print Length

146 pages (XXVIII+146+nulla)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 10.22 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.4" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 14.3 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.56" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback290g (10.23oz)
Hardback462g (16.30oz)

Media

Illustrations54
Videos7

OCLC Number

1612492105

THEMA

  • AVC
  • ABA
  • QDTN
  • ATFA
  • DSB
  • JBCC

BISAC

  • MUS020000
  • PHI001000
  • ART009000
  • LIT004110
  • PER004030
  • SOC002010

Keywords

  • Aesthetics and Interpretation
  • Subjectivity in Art
  • Music and Meaning
  • Czech Modernism
  • Individuality and Perception
  • Philosophy of Listening

The Doctrine of One

Personal Encounters with Film, Art and Music

  • Michael Beckerman (author)

This volume is a bold and original meditation on how we interpret art, music, and culture—and what it means to listen, see, and feel differently from others. Drawing on Czech history and aesthetics, the book moves from filmmaker Hugo Haas’s coded tributes to his murdered brother, to the haunting ex libris designs of Josef Váchal, to the deeply personal resonances of Schubert’s chamber music, Dvořák’s cello concerto, and Gideon Klein’s tragic Terezín Trio. Across these vivid case studies, the author asks whether meaning in art can ever be shared—or whether it always belongs to the individual observer.

Rejecting academic rigidity Michael Beckerman celebrates the ‘splitters’—those who honor specificity, subjectivity, and the singular force of a personal response. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book offers both a philosophical inquiry and a passionate defense of individuality in an age of conformity. It will captivate readers of musicology, cultural studies, and philosophy alike—anyone who has ever wondered what it truly means to interpret a work of art.

Endorsements

Music can make us cry, set us dancing, and evoke memories as vividly as Proust’s madeleine. But to mention such responses in a music classroom risks facing ridicule and shame. Those richly layered reactions get replaced by the objective skills of labeling of chords and forms.

In brilliant challenge to this pedagogical tradition, Michael Beckerman celebrates how an individual may make sense of and prize art precisely through those private associations. In a series of fascinating case studies, he explores the importance of secret codes in artists, film makers and composers, some of which pose unsolvable enigmas for the viewer or listener, and he examines instances in which meanings accrue to a work because of affective investments within a family. While not dismissing public modes of communication and signification, Beckerman restores dignity to the ways most of us interact with art: through the complex, idiosyncratic lens of the particular self — or, as he puts it, the doctrine of one.

Susan McClary

Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University

Additional Resources

[document]EPUB Accessibility Report

Contributors

Michael Beckerman

(author)
Carroll and Milton Petrie Chair and Collegiate Professor of Music at New York University

Michael Beckerman is an American musicologist specializing in Czech and Eastern European music. He has served as Carroll and Milton Petrie Chair and Collegiate Professor of Music at New York University and as Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He is Dean of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Among his most recent books he co-edited (with Paul Boghossian) 'Classical Music Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges', published by OBP in 2021.