Hanslick Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the... more

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.

The ineffable (l’ineffable) is a fundamental concept for a range of twentieth-century French philosophers (Louis Lavelle, Ferdinand Alquié, Jean Wahl). It plays a particularly important role in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music,... more

The ineffable (l’ineffable) is a fundamental concept for a range of twentieth-century French philosophers (Louis Lavelle, Ferdinand Alquié, Jean Wahl). It plays a particularly important role in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music, being also one of the crucial elements of his thought as a whole, including his ineffabilist metaphysics and moral philosophy. In Nick Zangwill’s latest book, Music and Aesthetic Reality (2015), which makes no reference to this continental tradition, the ineffable re-emerges as a key component of a philosophical defence of formalism in musical aesthetics and of realism with respect to musical aesthetic properties.
My aim in this paper is to explore the effective interrelation between these two musical ineffabilisms, despite the fact that the author of Music and the Ineffable is never mentioned in Zangwill’s text. First, I discuss briefly the triad indicible – ineffable – inexprimable in Jankélévitch, taking into account his negative metaphysics and ethics, as well as his Neoplatonic roots (Plotinus, Proclus), his dialogue with apophatic theology (Pseudo-Dionysius, Cappadocian Fathers) and the abundant references to mysticism (St John of the Cross, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius) in this context. Second, I reconstruct and discuss Zangwill’s three fundamental theses on music: formalism, realism and ineffabilism, offering some critical remarks. Third, I propose an original general classification of the ineffabilist theses on music (three universal and four particular), ordered with respect to the traditional formalist – antiformalist antithesis. As a result, various distinct ineffabilist theses are made explicit, compared and put in order. In the fourth and last part, I argue that both authors characterise the musical ineffable consistently in terms of immanent sense, typical of the ineffabilist theses grouped in my taxonomy as formalist, rejecting anti-formalist sorts of ineffabilism. Thus Jankélévitch, for all the methodological, axiological and stylistic features to which Zangwill is diametrically opposed, can be perfectly catalogued under the label coined by Zangwill for his own view on music: immanent mysticism.

Chapter 3 from Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives, (Routledge, 2014)

The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick had savagely criticised Liszt's symphonic poems when they appeared in the 1850s. This study looks at his reception of symphonic poems that appeared in the 1890s by Antonin Dvorak and Richard Strauss. A... more

The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick had savagely criticised Liszt's symphonic poems when they appeared in the 1850s. This study looks at his reception of symphonic poems that appeared in the 1890s by Antonin Dvorak and Richard Strauss. A careful comparison of his reviews reveals an underlying bias in favour of Dvorak, despite the fact that his works were even more dependent on their subject matter for comprehension than were Strauss's.

This chapter explores the connection between philosophy of language and philosophy of music, starting from the questions of meaning and understanding that the two fields arguably share. It considers how such notions as reference,... more

This chapter explores the connection between philosophy of language and philosophy of music, starting from the questions of meaning and understanding that the two fields arguably share. It considers how such notions as reference, representation, expression, communication, logic, and grammar have been used to explain the semantic content of music. Tracing the development of the comparison between language and music from the linguistic phase of analytic philosophy to its subsequent decline and the re-emergence of metaphysics and naturalism as the dominant explanatory frameworks, the chapter provides a diagnosis of the reasons behind this development in philosophy of music. The chapter closes by arguing, pace many contemporary accounts of musical meaning, that the comparison between language and music has not been exhausted as a source of philosophical illumination.

Em seu livro “Do belo musical”, de 1854, Eduard Hanslick defende que a arte da música está na contemplação pura da forma sonora e não nos sentimentos do compositor ou do ouvinte. Ainda persiste no âmbito musical uma perspectiva de que as... more

Em seu livro “Do belo musical”, de 1854, Eduard Hanslick defende que a arte da música está na contemplação pura da forma sonora e não nos sentimentos do compositor ou do ouvinte. Ainda persiste no âmbito musical uma perspectiva de que as melhores condições para a criação musical serão aquelas desvinculadas de outras linguagens. Por outro lado, há uma clara hegemonia da imagem na constituição e no pensamento do audiovisual, no qual percebe-se uma tendência narrativa centrada nos aspectos visuais e uma demanda para que a música possua, suscite, expresse ou represente uma emoção. Em linhas gerais, este trabalho ambiciona examinar a construção de uma estética da música no cinema baseada em critérios musicais, construídos com enfoque na própria expressão sonora e não na construção de um arcabouço afetivo para as cenas. Igualmente, pretende-se verificar os limites da conexão entre música e drama na construção do filme, examinando através de referências oferecidas pela filosofia da música e exemplos fílmicos a hipótese de que os dois campos podem comportar uma relação igualitária capaz de permitir o desenvolvimento musical e dramático sem que uma parte se sobreponha à outra. Este texto integra a dissertação de mestrado.

This article defends a formalist interpretation of Wittgenstein's later thought on music by comparing it with Eduard Hanslick's musical formalism. In doing so, it returns to a disagreement I have had with Bela Szabados who, in his book... more

This article defends a formalist interpretation of Wittgenstein's later thought on music by comparing it with Eduard Hanslick's musical formalism. In doing so, it returns to a disagreement I have had with Bela Szabados who, in his book Wittgenstein as a Philosophical Tone-Poet, claims that the attribution of formalism obscures the role that music played in the development of Wittgenstein's thought. The paper scrutinizes the four arguments Szabados presents to defend his claim, pertaining to alleged differences between Wittgenstein and Hanslick on their accounts of theory, beauty, rules, and the broader significance of music. I will argue that in each case the similarities between Wittgenstein's and Hanslick's respective views outshine possible differences. Ultimately, I will argue that instead of rendering music a marginal phenomenon suited for mere entertainment, formalism-as presented by Hanslick and Wittgenstein, whom I read as influenced by Kant's aesthetics-underscores music's ability to show fundamental features of reality and our relation to it. Music does this precisely as a sensuous yet structured medium that is irreducible to any conceptually determined domain. Resumen: Este artículo defiende una interpretación formalista del pensamiento posterior de Wittgenstein so-bre la música comparándolo con el formalismo musical de Eduard Hanslick. Con ese fin, reconsidera un des-acuerdo que he tenido con Bela Szabados. Este, en su libro Wittgenstein as a Philosophical Tone-Poet, afirma que la atribución de formalismo oscurece el papel que la música desempeñó en el desarrollo del pensamiento de Wittgenstein. El artículo estudia en detalle los cuatro argumentos que Szabados presenta para defender su tesis, que conciernen a supuestas diferencias entre Wittgenstein y Hanslick sobre sus enfoques de la teoría, la belleza, las reglas y la importancia en general de la música. Argumentaré que en cada caso las semejanzas entre los puntos de vista de Wittgenstein y Hanslick eclipsan las posibles diferencias. En última instancia, argumen-taré que en lugar de presentar la música como un fenómeno marginal adecuado para el mero entretenimiento, el formalismo-tal y como es presentado por Hanslick y Wittgenstein, a quienes entiendo bajo la influencia de la estética de Kant-subraya la habilidad de la música para mostrar características fundamentales de la realidad y de nuestra relación con ella. La música es capaz de hacer esto precisamente al ser tratada como un medio sensual pero estructurado que es irreductible a cualquier campo determinado conceptualmente.

Bis in die 1870er Jahre hat sich der Wiener Kritiker Eduard Hanslick stets negativ über die Werke Giuseppe Verdis geäußert, wobei er sich krassester Vergleiche bediente. Der Aufsatz stellt in Frage, ob es sich dabei tatsächlich um... more

Bis in die 1870er Jahre hat sich der Wiener Kritiker Eduard Hanslick stets negativ über die Werke Giuseppe Verdis geäußert, wobei er sich krassester Vergleiche bediente. Der Aufsatz stellt in Frage, ob es sich dabei tatsächlich um Fehlurteile handelte; es wird gezeigt, dass es sich bei Hanslicks Verrissen trotz ihrer drastischen Sprache um scharfsinnige Analysen handelt, die auf das Neuartige von Verdis Musik hinweisen, das jedoch nicht mit den ästhetischen Vorlieben des Wiener Kritikers im Einklang stand.

My article argues for the consideration of sociocultural parameters in analyzing Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetics, scholarly writings, and academic activities. Scholarship often treats Hanslick’s acontextual perspective as an absolute... more

My article argues for the consideration of sociocultural parameters in analyzing Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetics, scholarly writings, and academic activities. Scholarship often treats Hanslick’s acontextual perspective as an absolute position, irrespective of Hanslick’s contexts or of the historical conditions that have led to Hanslick’s formalist viewpoint. My text thus explores Hanslick’s nation neutral attitude towards music that derives from the multi-ethnic makeup of Austrian society, outlines how Habsburg science policies countered nationalist sentiments by fostering positivist methods, and shows how Hanslick corresponds intentionally to these social and political criteria.

German-speaking scholarship on Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise "On the Musically Beautiful" (1854) is concerned primarily with the historical background of Hanslick’s argument. Whereas contemporary investigations into Hanslick’s... more

German-speaking scholarship on Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise "On the Musically Beautiful" (1854) is concerned primarily with the historical background of Hanslick’s argument. Whereas contemporary investigations into Hanslick’s aesthetics emphasised theoretical overlaps with Johann Friedrich Herbart’s ahistorical formalism, German scholars of the 1970s and 1980s highlighted similarities to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In this respect, Dahlhaus specifically accentuated that Hanslick’s doctrine implies an exposure to Hegelianism as the "reigning philosophy of the 1830s and 1840s". By reconstructing the historical reception of Hegel’s system in Austria, however, Dahlhaus’s premise becomes thoroughly problematic. Habsburg authorities considered German Idealism to be politically intolerable, thereby prompting numerous sackings of Austrian university lecturers on account of "dangerous" Hegelianism. We take this historical framework as a suitable starting point for a comprehensive investigation of Hanslick’s Hegelian leanings that have to be carefully explored in the light of 'Austria’s' critical attitude towards speculative philosophy. "On the Musically Beautiful", however, comprises important elements of Hegelian aesthetics that are not limited to Hegel’s system but rather extend to Hegelian aesthetics in general (Kahlert, Krüger, Vischer etc.). Vischer’s hypothesis regarding the historical development of musical material particularly influenced Hanslick’s aesthetic outlook, who did not share the ahistorical conception of Herbartian formalism. Thus, we interpret Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise as an 'eclectic' fusion of diverse theoretical frameworks, ultimately reconciling Herbart and Vischer as the opposing extremes of mid-19th century aesthetics.

Abstract: Eduard Hanslick is usually regarded as a representative of musical formalism, e.g. by Elżbieta Dziębowska, Alicja Jarzębska, Roman Ingarden, Krzysztof Lipka and by such English authors as Malcolm Budd, Peter Kivy, Stephen Davies... more

Abstract: Eduard Hanslick is usually regarded as a representative of musical formalism, e.g. by Elżbieta Dziębowska, Alicja Jarzębska, Roman Ingarden, Krzysztof Lipka and by such English authors as Malcolm Budd, Peter Kivy, Stephen Davies and Nick Zangwill. In this paper I will try to demonstrate that Hanslick was not such an extreme formalist as it is usually claimed and that he had no intention of expelling emotions from music altogether. What is more, it turns out that the core of his views on the relationship between music and emotions seems close to the most uncontroversial elements of nearly all the recent theories formulated by Kivy, Davies, Levinson or Ridley, to name but a few.
Key words: Hanslick, music, emotion, formalism, Budd, Lipka
Słowa kluczowe: Hanslick, muzyka, emocje, formalizm, Budd, Lipka
Authors quoted: M. Beardsley, O.K. Bouwsma, M. Budd, C. Dahlhaus, S. Davies, E. Dziębowska, A. Einstein, H. Elzenberg, M. Gołaszewska, K. Guczalski, E. Hanslick, R. Ingarden, A. Jarzębska, P. Kivy, K. Lipka, Plato, A. Schopenhauer, L. Tolstoi, N. Zangwill
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This essay poses the question of whether Ambros’s "Gränzen der Musik und Poesie" can rightfully be considered a polemic response to Hanslick’s aesthetics and to what extent these classic treatises share similar traits as in their related... more

This essay poses the question of whether Ambros’s "Gränzen der Musik und Poesie" can rightfully be considered a polemic response to Hanslick’s aesthetics and to what extent these classic treatises share similar traits as in their related critique of programmatic instrumental music. Although Hanslick and Ambros are situated in a common historical setting and their theoretical discrepancies are overstated frequently, I argue against the recent blurring of their aesthetic approaches by drawing attention to three fields of conflict: 1. music-specific aesthetics versus universal aesthetics, 2. the notion of "form," and 3. the concept of emotion and its relation to music. An analysis of Ambros’s reading of certain central ideas of Hanslick’s aesthetics (form, emotion, intellect, etc.) will thus attest to Ambros’s somewhat lopsided interpretation of "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen." Finally, however, I will show how Ambros’s notion of "mood" (as opposed to "emotion"), its complex relation to 'pure' music, and its inevitably subjective nature is ultimately compatible with Hanslick’s formalism. Ambros and Hanslick thus find common ground regarding an issue they are typically considered to disagree on: music’s subtle relation to human affect states.

The attribution to music of an extra-musical " sense " (that is, a sense not identical with musicological and physical elements and components of music) is highly problematic because its validity is either limited to the subjective... more

The attribution to music of an extra-musical " sense " (that is, a sense not identical with musicological and physical elements and components of music) is highly problematic because its validity is either limited to the subjective conditions of reception of music or irrelevant regarding music itself. Yet also the complete exclusion of this extra-musical " sense " from the field of theoretical possibles is problematic: music risks to be reduced to mere sound, losing its aesthetic relevance. A mediated position is possible: the extra-musical " sense " of music exists in and can be grasped through its analogical (that is, artistic) representation, when music is present within other artistic expressions (such as literature or cinematography). This article assumes a specific form of musical writing characterized by the repetition of the same note and rhythm pattern (deduced by the analysis of baroque and minimalist compositions), and it seeks the extra-musical " sense " of this form of music via the reference to some cinematographic uses of it.

This paper approaches Eduard Hanslick’s polemics against feelings in music. Hanslick’s musical formalism can be considered as a reaction against the so called aesthetics of the effect and the conception of music as expression of feelings.... more

This paper approaches Eduard Hanslick’s polemics against feelings in music. Hanslick’s musical formalism can be considered as a reaction against the so called aesthetics of the effect and the conception of music as expression of feelings. Against these theories, Hanslick tries to establish an autonomy of music not in its effect upon the subject, but in the object of art itself. He does not accept the conception which considers that the aim of music is the arising of feelings, nor the one that considers the feelings as the content represented by music in its works. According to him, the beautiful in music must hold in itself its significance and the effect of music upon feelings cannot be considered as the aesthetic principle of music.

Peter Kivy w dwóch swoich artykułach na temat Eduarda Hanslicka (Kivy, 1988; 1990b) wpisuje się w typowe rozumienie tego klasyka estetyki muzyki jako skrajnego formalisty, przypisuje mu ekstremalne i niewiarygodne poglądy, a następnie... more

Peter Kivy w dwóch swoich artykułach na temat Eduarda Hanslicka
(Kivy, 1988; 1990b) wpisuje się w typowe rozumienie tego klasyka estetyki muzyki jako skrajnego formalisty, przypisuje mu ekstremalne i niewiarygodne poglądy, a następnie srodze go za nie krytykuje. W niniejszym artykule chciałbym pokazać, że typowa formalistyczna interpretacja Hanslicka (np. taka, jaką reprezentuje Kivy) jest w niektórych punktach nietrafna, a przez to wynikająca z niej krytyka Hanslicka – częściowo bezprzedmiotowa.

Eduard Hanslick is famous for his formalist aesthetics, which confines aesthetic analysis to the ‘music itself,’ without regard to the historical and cultural setting of the artwork or its creator. This view has led to an analogous... more

Eduard Hanslick is famous for his formalist aesthetics, which confines aesthetic analysis to the ‘music itself,’ without regard to the historical and cultural setting of the artwork or its creator. This view has led to an analogous scholarly approach to Hanslick’s central treatise "On the Musically Beautiful" (1854), which is often classified as an ‘absolute’ aesthetics, derived only from philosophical considerations and the mounting discourse on Wagner’s operas and the program symphony. This scholarly tradition is countered by my article, which contextualizes Hanslick’s methodology as part of Habsburg education and science policy, thereby showing how his method is the product of specific political conditions. Starting with 18th-century schooling measures, I set the scene for the key features of Count Thun’s profound overhaul of Austrian education following the revolution of 1848. Thun and his advisers favored a positivist paradigm, countering ‘romanticist speculation’ while at the same time appeasing the tensions between Austria’s ethnic groups by seeking ‘nation neutral’ research methods. Hanslick’s aesthetics was written partly during his tenure at Thun’s ministry and reflects its general outlook by adopting positivist stances and abstaining from questions of cultural heritage. Finally, this article also explores parallels to the concurrent foundation of art history as an academic discipline in Vienna, demonstrating methodological overlaps between both subjects deriving from their identical political background. Rather than being an ‘absolute’ aesthetics, concerned exclusively with abstract musical qualities, Hanslick’s treatise reacts directly to the realities of 19th-century Austria, thus navigating skillfully between political as well as cultural demands.

Moritz Geiger, Edmund Husserl’s pupil, was the first phenomenologist to devote himself to the issues of aesthetics throughout all his life. Growing out of a background in psychological aesthetics, mainly the aesthetics of empathy, he was... more

Moritz Geiger, Edmund Husserl’s pupil, was the first phenomenologist to devote himself to the issues of aesthetics throughout all his life. Growing out of a background in psychological aesthetics, mainly the aesthetics of empathy, he was chiefly concerned with the study of aesthetic experience. The present article pays attention to Geiger’s concept of aesthetic enjoyment and especially the position in it of music, while analysing the most important assumptions of Eduard Hanslick’s music aesthetics as Geiger implemented them into his own reasoning. The paper shows that Geiger’s position was mainly rooted in the Kantian formulation of the aesthetic attitude as it was echoed in Hanslick. Both Hanslick and Geiger were helped in their thoughts about the position of music among the arts by the role of perceptual parameters. While Geiger acquired a more differentiated position in classifying aesthetic perception over Hanslick’s brusque distinction between the right (aesthetic) and inappropriate (pathological) experience of art, in the context of his seemingly puritan formalism he could also appreciate Hanslick’s cautious claim about the ideas conveyed by music because his position later shifted toward positing the existential significance of art.

In this paper I begin to fashion a theory of musical form that I call historical formalism. Historical formalism posits that our perception of the formal properties of a musical work is informed by considerations not only of artistic... more

In this paper I begin to fashion a theory of musical form that I call historical formalism. Historical formalism posits that our perception of the formal properties of a musical work is informed by considerations not only of artistic categories but also of the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances within which that work was composed.

This article argues for an implicit version of "enhanced formalism" in Eduard Hanslick's aesthetics, usually misread as "extreme" formalism devoid of any positive account of emotion and music. It outlines "enhanced formalism" in its... more

This article argues for an implicit version of "enhanced formalism" in Eduard Hanslick's aesthetics, usually misread as "extreme" formalism devoid of any positive account of emotion and music. It outlines "enhanced formalism" in its contemporary incarnations by Stephen Davies and Peter Kivy, who hold that music provides "emotion characteristics in appearances" via its motion, dynamics, and (melodic) gestures; an idea also to be found in Hanslick's "On the Musically Beautiful." The article explores common features with Hanslick's approach, and explains why Hanslick ultimately abandoned the concept of expressive properties as intrinsic properties of musical structure as the basis of objective aesthetics. It thereby opposes the one-sided reading of Hanslick's aesthetics as having "nothing to do" with emotion by drawing attention to (1) the role of emotive arousal, (2) the theory of music presenting expressive silhouettes, and (3) the concept of scientific aesthetics as presented in "On the Musically Beautiful." The article moreover addresses the English-language translations of Hanslick's treatise by Gustav Cohen and Geoffrey Payzant, who use the 7th and 8th edition of this book, which underwent significant changes during Hanslick's lifetime. By drawing attention to earlier editions, on which German-language discourse is largely based, it attempts to explain general discrepancies in English-language and German-language Hanslick scholarship.

This article deals with Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic classic "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen" (“On the Musically Beautiful”), or VMS, regarding both the text itself and its most important contexts. We first give an overview of the history of... more

This article deals with Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic classic "Vom Musikalisch-Schönen" (“On the Musically Beautiful”), or VMS, regarding both the text itself and its most important contexts. We first give an overview of the history of relevant scholarship and relevant research perspectives and then sketch what we believe are the main current challenges of Hanslick scholarship: (a) an understanding of VMS as a fusion of different, often heterogeneous philosophical orientations and their embedment in political and institutional factors and (b) an understanding of VMS as a ‘dynamic text,’ that is, a text that develops out of pre-publications and evolves over the different editions and even chapters of the book, thus challenging traditional views of VMS as a monolithic, uniform text with a set of stable and determinable arguments. Rather than investigating ‘the’ aesthetics of VMS, Hanslick scholarship, we believe, needs to place more emphasis on how Hanslick’s argument develops over time and what factors are decisive for the many textual decisions that Hanslick made from the pre-publications of 1853 and 1854 up to the ‘final’ edition of 1902. Our approach integrates the older intellectual history approach and newer trends towards a broader contextualization and demonstrates how more information on the generic context of Hanslick’s aesthe­tic ideas can also shed light on the intellectual foundations of his treatise as well as on the development of his aesthetic positions.

A common tendency throughout the history of thought concerning the nature of music has been to attribute to it a peculiar power to represent the dynamic of the universe. The tradition has perhaps its most developed expression in the... more

A common tendency throughout the history of thought concerning the nature of music has been to attribute to it a peculiar power to represent the dynamic of the universe. The tradition has perhaps its most developed expression in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The strict formalism present in Eduard Hanslick's treatise, On the Musically Beautiful, clearly stands in stark opposition to such ways of thinking. And yet the book's final paragraph (in the first edition, at least) ends with a paragraph in which music is referred to as the 'sounding image of the great motions of the universe'. The present paper examines the extent to which this apparently Schopenhaurian moment in Hanslick can be reconciled with the formalism promoted by the rest of the book. I argue, in opposition to differing claims to the contrary made by Mark Evan Bonds, and by Christopher Landerer and Nick Zangwill, that the original concluding paragraph is inconsistent with the rest of Hanslick's argument. At the same time, the paragraph cannot simply be written off as a slip of the pen. Rather, it seems to reflect an anxiety on Hanslick's part about musical formalism failing to provide any account of why the art of music is valuable.

Resumo: No semestre de inverno de 1932/33, Theodor Adorno ministrou na Universidade de Frankfurt um curso sobre o ensaio Do Belo Musical. Num artigo publicado alguns anos mais tarde, Adorno enfatizava a importância desse livro, uma vez... more

Resumo: No semestre de inverno de 1932/33, Theodor Adorno ministrou na Universidade de Frankfurt um curso sobre o ensaio Do Belo Musical. Num artigo publicado alguns anos mais tarde, Adorno enfatizava a importância desse livro, uma vez que ele fixava o elemento da lógica imanente da composição musical, contra os autores que defendiam a música programática. Com efeito, um dos principais objetivos do ensaio de Hanslick era o estabelecimento da autonomia da obra musical. De acordo com ele, o belo na música é algo especificamente musical consistindo apenas e tão somente nos próprios sons e em sua combinação artística. Embora as referências diretas a Hanslick sejam relativamente raras e esparsas nos textos de Adorno, não devemos subestimar suas ressonâncias no pensamento desse autor. O objetivo desse artigo é investigar em que medida as ideias de Hanslick acerca da autonomia estética da música poderiam ter influenciado o conceito adorniano de material musical, bem como a sua abordagem da análise musical.
Palavras‐chave:Theodor Adorno e Eduard Hanslick; o belo musical; autonomia estética da música.
Abstract: In the winter term 1932/33, Theodor Adorno conducted at Frankfurt University a seminar on Hanslick's essay Vom musikalisch‐Schönen. In an article published some years later, Adorno emphasized the importance of this book, for it fixed the moment of immanent logic of musical composition against the authors that defended programmatic music. In fact, one of the main goals of Hanslick's essay is to discuss the establishment of a musical work autonomy. According to him, the beautiful in music is something specifically musical, consisting simply and solely of tones and their artistic combination. Despite direct references to Hanslick's ideas in Adorno's texts are somewhat rare and scattered, the resonances of the former in the thinking of the latter should be not underestimated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent Hanslick's ideas about the aesthetic autonomy of music might have influenced Adorno's concept of musical material as well as his approach to musical analysis. Keywords: Theodor Adorno and Eduard Hanslick; Vom musikalisch‐Schönen; aesthetic autonomy of music.

Studies about Hanslick's musical aesthetics often emphasize his negative thesis, which caused many controversies and discussions. However, an adequate investigation of his positive thesis is often set aside by musicologists. In this... more

Studies about Hanslick's musical aesthetics often emphasize his negative thesis, which caused many controversies and discussions. However, an adequate investigation of his positive thesis is often set aside by musicologists. In this article, I not only discuss the foundations of his negative thesis, but also those of the positive one, as well as the notions of form, content and spiritual content. At the same time, I examine to which extent Hanslick`s viewpoints are reminiscent of some conceptions by French authors of the 18th Century, as well as by some early Romantic writers like Wackenroder, Tieck and Hoffmann.

L'obiettivo di questo studio è indagare alcuni elementi strutturali del pensiero estetico-filosofico di Richard Wagner e del suo Ring des Nibelungen al fine di rintracciarvi un paradosso cruciale e costante, comune alla gran parte... more

L'obiettivo di questo studio è indagare alcuni elementi strutturali del pensiero estetico-filosofico di Richard Wagner e del suo Ring des Nibelungen al fine di rintracciarvi un paradosso cruciale e costante, comune alla gran parte dell'orizzonte wagneriano: quello di una radicale istanza messianico-escatologica - espressa principalmente dai concetti di "redenzione" e di "puramente umano" - contraddetta al suo interno da un'istanza opposta, che si può esprimere nell'idea di un riassorbimento mitico-pagano del mondo nel suo Principio originario. Dal punto di vista estetico, questo paradosso si evince dal connotato politico-rivoluzionario e soteriologico attribuito al dramma dell'avvenire, compromesso da una sostanziale "metafisica dell'espressione" che pretende di riassumere (e riassorbire) in sé l'intera esperienza dell'arte greco-occidentale nella forma esclusiva del rito mito-poietico e musicale. Nella Tetralogia ugualmente, l'elemento messianico incarnato dalla stirpe dei Wälsungen - e in particolare da Siegfried e Brünnhilde - finisce ad ultimo per rovesciarsi in un puro adempimento del destino cosmico già prescritto, corrispondente ad un totale ritorno dell'elemento verticale-maschile (rappresentato da Wotan) nel grembo ciclico e oscuro della terra (incarnato da Erda e dalle Norne). La stessa dinamica leitmotivica e musicale del Ring riflette questo processo di ciclizzazione e saturazione progressiva di tutti gli archetipi (poetici e musicali) di tipo lineare, affermativo e diatonico. Con un breve excursus finale sul Parsifal e sulla visione politico-antropologica di Wagner, si mostra infine come l'escatologia rovesciata (ossia strutturalmente impossibilitata) rappresenti il nodo ultimo, mai veramente disciolto, dell'immensa figura del drammaturgo tedesco.

The history of programme music stretches back centuries, but only in the nineteenth century did it enter into widespread use. Indeed, seminal compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin to Arnold Schoenberg and Jean Sibelius... more

The history of programme music stretches back centuries, but only in the nineteenth century did it enter into widespread use. Indeed, seminal compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin to Arnold Schoenberg and Jean Sibelius have helped programme music to secure a position within the artistic pantheon, albeit not without bringing a significant amount of controversy in tow. Yet despite its ubiquitous presence in the nineteenth century, scholarship has not adequately articulated the full extent of programme music’s range and impact. This volume explores the diverse ways in which programme music was defined, historicized, practiced, disseminated, and judged. It considers how biography, tradition, and function informed the compositional approaches taken by Beethoven, Joseph Joachim, Ethel Smyth, and Zygmunt Noskowski, among others. It draws on extra-musical elements—novels, poems, lithographs, and other forms of creative expression—to determine the ontological profile of works by Chopin, Franz Liszt, Antonio Pasculli, Piotr Tchaikovsky, and Leoš Janáček. It situates compositions by Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Sibelius, and Schoenberg within the ongoing discourse around Hanslickian absolute and Lisztian programme music. And it visits major European cities to highlight the critical streams of reception toward the end of the century. Throughout, it repeatedly engages with questions of generic identity (with special attention given to the symphonic poem), issues of narrativity and topicality, and considerations of form and structure.

Il mio intento non è né quello di descrivere la fisiologia umana, di delineare un modello di biologia descrittiva delle funzioni organiche, né quello di disegnare una sorta di mappa delle emozioni umane, nonostante che «sia sempre la... more

Il mio intento non è né quello di descrivere la fisiologia umana, di delineare un modello di biologia descrittiva delle funzioni organiche, né quello di disegnare una sorta di mappa delle emozioni umane, nonostante che «sia sempre la nostra capacità di provare peculiari sentimenti morali che ispira la nostra vita etica»[3], bensì quello di estrarre una certa normatività (scaturente da principi e valori che, relativamente all’uomo, possono essere considerati assoluti) dalla ambigua ma unitaria costituzione antropologica umana.

Hanslick has a subtle and compelling account of non-absolute music. I articulate and defend that account so that it throws light on his conception of absolute music. Hanslick thinks that aiming at musical-beauty is the essence of (most)... more

Hanslick has a subtle and compelling account of non-absolute music. I articulate and defend that account so that it throws light on his conception of absolute music. Hanslick thinks that aiming at musical-beauty is the essence of (most) music. Nevertheless, Hanslick recognizes the variety of things that music does apart from aiming at musical-beauty, even though he does think that musical-beauty is in some sense the central function or purpose of (most) music. Music with only the musical-beauty function can be called ‘absolute music’; but much music does more than that. I describe the way that Hanslick puts musical-beauty at the centre of his understanding of music, whether absolute or non-absolute. Making musical-beauty central and essential to all music, as Hanslick does, allows that things with musical-beauty functions can also have other functions--in particular, they can be the setting for words to express feelings. But Hanslick denies the equality of music and text when the two are combined: music, he thinks, has priority. Spelling out this priority means probing what I call the ‘back door’ to Hanslick’s general view of music, which is his claim that the nature of instrumental music gives the nature of all music; so non-absolute music is music in virtue of its musical-beauty function. Why believe that? Hanslick has arguments. What I call the ‘key to the back door’ of Hanslick’s view of music is: first, his argument that small variations in the music can spoil the beauty of the whole, while small variations in the text do not; and second, his argument that the musical-beauty of a music-text combination does not consist in expressing the text well. These arguments are persuasive, and they show that musical-beauty, where music is combined with text, does not consist primarily in the poetic theme, but it does consist primarily in the instrumental aspects of the music. If so, there is no equality between music and text. This is why good music (like good architecture) is adaptable to a variety of different texts and purposes.

The determination of an extra-musical “sense” of music is theoretically problematic: even if this “sense” is linked not to sentiments (as it generally is) but to the expectations of a specific Zeitgeist, in no case it is possible to... more

The determination of an extra-musical “sense” of music is theoretically problematic: even if this “sense” is linked not to sentiments (as it generally is) but to the expectations of a specific Zeitgeist, in no case it is possible to negate the illegitimate universalization of an empirical position. Nevertheless also the formalist exclusion of any extra-musical “sense” from the field of theoretical possibles is problematic: the identification of music with its measurable components and elements (such as “sound, tone, rhythm” and intensity) would reduce music’s aesthetics (that is, its “beauty”) to the physical laws of sounds. On one hand the direct conceptualization is fallacious, on the other hand the exclusion of all conceptualizations is aesthetically irrelevant. This leads to the explication of the limits of any method concerning the extra-musical “sense” (whether positive or negative method), and at the same time it clarifies the peculiar, a-conceptual nature of the laws of beauty.