The volume at hand presents an inquiry about life as an aesthetic idea of music. If music, above all purely instrumental, 'absolute' music expresses aesthetic ideas, and even the idea of the aesthetic idea itself as an affective substrate of language and culture, as Kant claimed, then the most inclusive aesthetic idea cannot be but life. No wonder then that there have been compositions ambitious enough to address this most inclusive idea and the indefinite object of life directly in their titles and programmes, such as Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony The Inextinguishable. If the object of life is indefinite, a necessarily complementary strategy to approach life as an aesthetic idea of music is to trace compositions addressing the aesthetic ideas closest to it. Subjectivity, process, heroism, emerging presence, eccentric positionality, virtual temporality, biography, all these are ideas that explicate, transcend, and dramatize life.