ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with music, and discusses the transposition of Alfred Gell’s theory of agents, patients, and indices from the material to the musical domain, focusing particularly on the movement to create historically authentic performances. It also deals with a useful positioning of Gell’s arguments relative to the aesthetics of Kant and J. C. F. Schiller, and proceeds to outline a novel investigation into the mathematics of art, engaging topology, decentred spatial conceptions, and particularly knotting. The book argues that symbolic meaning is too extensively attested to, to be set aside in the fashion. It examines the values of Gell’s perspective on the person- and god-like properties of images, particularly in the ritual context, but finds in the Tibetan case that images of the Dalai Lama, like many other art forms, are highly determined by the politics of neo-nationalism.
