Leonard B. Meyer (January 12, 1918 – December 30, 2007) was a composer, author, and philosopher.
He contributed major works in the fields of aesthetic theory in music, and of compositional analysis.
As a composer, he studied under Stefan Wolpe, Otto Luening, and Aaron Copland.
[1] His most influential work, Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), combined Gestalt Theory and theories by the Pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey to try to explain the existence of emotion in music.
[3] Meyer's 1967 work "Music, the Arts, and Ideas," was influential in defining the transition to postmodernism in light of new works such as George Rochberg's Music for the Magic Theater, which was premiered at the University of Chicago in 1967.