ABSTRACT
In India, China, and the Arab Middle East, pre-modern philosophers and writers on music generated substantial sets of treatises – primarily in Sanskrit, Mandarin, and Arabic, respectively – dealing with what could broadly be termed the philosophy of music. Despite marked differences in approach and content, within each culture writers established intellectual traditions animated by a sense of historicity, a combination of mystical and empirical approaches, and earnest attempts to hypothesize the relation of music to society and the cosmos in an era pre-dating modern science.
