Conceptualizing music: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Hegelian currents in German music criticism, 1848-1887. DPhil Dissertation, University of Oxford, 2005. (original) (raw)
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At first glance, ticgcl says so1nc striking but apparently inconsistent things about n1usic:. I-Ie appears, first, to defend tnusical forrnalisrn: the view, urged by theorists frorn Eduard l.Janslick to Peter !(ivy, that pure inslru-n1cnt:al n1usic is an acoustic arrangcrncnl that signifies nothing. In rnusic as an art, I-Icgcl notes, "sound, just as sound, is treated as an end in itself; ... its own forn1, artistic notc-forrnation, can bccornc its essential end" (112:899), 1 I•le goes on to indicate in particular that successful art n1usic need not: be based on any verbal tcxl. fVIusic has the rnaxinuun possibility of" freeing itself fro1n any actual text as well as fron1 the expression of any specific su~jcct-n1attcr, with a view Lo finding satisfaction solely in a self-enclosed series of the co1~junc tions, changes,. oppositions, and rnodulations falling within the purely tnusical sphere of sounds.
Musicology Today, 2022
My study is an attempt to philosophically account for the competing influence in the 20th century musical understanding and practice of two radical and opposed aesthetics: the ideal of transgressive art (defined by Anthony Julius) associated with the avant-garde and the ideal of recovering the original and authentic art associated with extreme nationalism. My thesis is that these perspectives, under their extreme formulations, are, in fact, kindred sides of the broader philosophy of Modernity as developed since the Enlightenment. Also, as a consequence, by deconstructing the historical meaning and justification of these aesthetic forms of radicalism, one can reinterpret the artistic profiles of personalities such as Arnold Schönberg, thought of either as a revolutionary who totally rebelled against the musical past (as Theodor W. Adorno considered), or as not revolutionary enough (as Pierre Boulez thought). My historical methodology is based on using the two key-terms, “originality” and “transgression”, as regulative concepts within the constellation (a concept proposed by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics) of musical modernism. Thereby, I will show how these key-terms are connected to a network of other romantic concepts: organism, authenticity, aura (Walter Benjamin’s sense), integrity, folklore, and contemplation, in order to reveal how the structural and social meaning ascribed to this set of concepts greatly influenced the process of redefining musical thinking and musical reception. The main philosophies I will use as conceptual landmarks to clarify these interconnections are Martin Heidegger’s remarks about the work of art and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian terminology and presuppositions. My overall conclusion will point towards the necessity of going beyond such radical modern oppositions with the aim of finding new types of theoretical principles and perspectives, more adequate as conceptual tools for dealing with contemporary artistic realities. LINK: musicologytoday.ro/49/MT49studiesStoicescu.pdf
The question of how to understand music with reference to its historical context has been center stage in musicological debates of the past four decades. Very broadly, the general split within the discipline can be understood as follows. On the one hand, some scholars have emphasized the need to not forget the specifically formal properties of musical works in an attempt to understand the relationship between music and society. On the other hand, analyses of the broader, "extramusical" context of music have drawn theories and concepts from anthropology, political theory, and semiotic criticism, without always demonstrating the relevance of such concepts for the interrogation of specifically sonic phenomena. In short, the move from music to politics and broader culture has either been hasty or eschewed in practice (though never denied in theory). 1 It will be fair to say that the central problem of how we can duly respect the nonconceptual character of music, and simultaneously find a way to discuss its specific role in social life through language, has not been superseded by the proliferation of various methodologies within musicology in recent years. To a large extent, it is the curiously paradoxical status of music as an artits highly immediate yet necessarily abstract naturethat makes its analysis difficult, and it also suggests that to think about music historically we need a conceptual framework that is sufficiently abstract yet capable of grasping historical determinateness.
This thesis falls into two distinct parts. The first gives an account of the economic and social factors which contributed to the emergence of the new post-Cartesian world order in early nineteenth-century Germany and attempts to ground the German response to the French theories of mimesis in this broader context. The second, larger, part engages in an analysis of the philosophical aesthetics of the critic and writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and the Idealists Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, paying particular attention to the notions of musical closure embedded in the their usage or intimation of the terms autonomy, ontology and the ideal. To this end, this thesis attempts to analyse the relationship between the organic structures of early nineteenth-century
The Structure and Eurhythmy of Music: A Reading of Hegel's Aesthetics
The aim of this paper is to characterize the melodic, harmonic, and structural resolutions that occur in the auditory medium of music; where bars and beats provide an organizational framework for structure, proportion, and harmony; and the striking resemblance of music with the structures devised in other art mediums; such as architecture, sculpture, and poetry. The subdivision of _caesura_ (meaning verse in Greek) into syllables and vowels, and the positioning of sculptures and architecture according to the laws of symmetry and visual harmony—are strikingly similar to the manner in which music is devised and arranged according to the structural division composed of bars, beats, and notes. The melodic characteristics that are attempted to be demonstrated in this essay, are twofold; the first point, concerns the potential of music to express its inner content within the subjectivity of a beholder despite the medium’s temporal characteristics. The second point of this essay concerns the capacity of the medium to transcend _its own_ laws of symmetry, structure, beat, etc.—and achieve an incomparable level of expression of inner life and emotion—to which a few resemblances with poetry will be mentioned.
Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music. By Michael P. Steinberg
Music & Letters, 2009
The origins of this book," a colleague of mine once wrote, "are obscure even to myself, but the occasion of its conception I remember quite vividly." 1 In my own case, the occasion that launched this book is indeed clear to me, though at the time I had no clue of the eventual project's shape. In August 1990 I gave a short preconcert lecture on Brahms at the first Bard Music Festival. To an audience awaiting a performance of the D minor piano concerto, I argued that the urgency and debate in Brahms's musical texture engaged cultural issues and differences as well as musical ones, that Brahms's late nineteenth-century musical discourse had incorporated music's capacity to think, to argue, and to develop the position of a thinking, feeling subject in juxtaposition with a multiple and challenging cultural and political world. "Absolute" music, I argued, lived in the world and spoke to it. Here was the first kernel of this book's argument of the importance of nineteenth-century music as a language of subjectivity. I gave that lecture and ultimately wrote this book as a cultural historian committed to music not only as an object of study (or a vehicle of pleasure) but as a mode of cultural experience and understanding and, itself, as a potential language of cultural analysis. What we colloquially refer to as "classical" European music (a category looser than and distinct from that of the classical style or period) accrues through the nineteenth century as a mutually referential world of unusual coherence. The composers and works I engage in this book are generally well known to their peers and successors. In a process itself reflective of that coherence, this book's argument has evolved incrementally. Through the 1990s, the project was nurtured consistently by my lecture and essay assignments at the Bard Festival and its annual reconsideration of a single composer: Mendelssohn in 1991, Strauss in 1992, Dvořák in 1993, Schumann in 1994, Bartók in 1995. A volume of essays and documents on each year's composer "and his world" has appeared annually since 1990 from Princeton University Press; this book's chapter 4, on Mendelssohn and Schumann, contains arguments initially explored in essays I wrote for these collections. In the early 1990s I introduced aspects of the project into my cultural history courses at Cornell, and by the time of a sabbatical year in 1995-96 I had developed the conviction that there should be a book here, though there certainly wasn't one yet. A first draft was complete in 1998; its revisions continued to benefit from the
Aesthetica Preprint, 2021
This paper analyzes a decisive moment in the German aesthetics of the nineteenth century, that is, the passage from a view that considered poetry (i.e. literature) the most perfect art within the system of the individual arts to one in which music is the art par excellence. On the one hand, we find the philosophical perspectives of the first half of the nineteenth century (Hegel, Solger, Schelling). On the other hand are the views that, beginning with Schopenhauer, dominate the second half of the century with Nietzsche and Wagner. The aim of this paper is to show the meaning of this historical-philosophical moment in order to produce an interpretation that concerns both the theoretical consideration of art and the general philosophical approach of these authors. I intend to read this transition as one of the initial moments of the upheavals that affected art in the twentieth century, which some recent interpreters have read, in Hegelian terms, as the "end of art".