Aesthetic Theory (1970), by Theodor Adorno is a philosophical treatise by the most important thinker of theFrankfurt School. Adorno was a musician and composer as well as one the twentieth century's greatest theoreticians. A great deal in this volume addresses the meanings of music.

Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach is an anthology of essays about performance under the rubrics of cultural studies, semiotics and decon-struction, post-Marxism, feminism, theater history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth is a wonderful novel about a string quartet and the experience of music. Seth is also a poet.

Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979) is a consistently engaging and challenging meditation on puzzles and paradoxes of logic, mathematics, physics, music, art, and philosophy, presented in a series of essays and...