Absolute music (sometimes abstract music) is music that is not explicitly 'about' anything; in contrast to
program music
Program music or programatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece's title, or in the form of program note ...
, it is non-
representational.
[M. C. Horowitz (ed.), ''New Dictionary of the History of Ideas'', , vol.1, p. 5] The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early
German Romanticism, such as
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (13 July 1773 – 13 February 1798) was a German jurist and writer. With Ludwig Tieck and the Schlegel brothers, he has co-founded the German Romanticism.
Life
Wackenroder was born in Berlin. He was a close frien ...
,
Ludwig Tieck
Johann Ludwig Tieck (; ; 31 May 177328 April 1853) was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Early life
Tieck was born in B ...
and
E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
in a programme to
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, is a choral symphony, the final complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed between 1822 and 1824. It was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824. The symphony is regarded by many critics and musi ...
.
[
The aesthetic ideas underlying absolute music derive from debates over the relative value of what was known in the early years of aesthetic theory as the fine arts. ]Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aest ...
, in his '' Critique of Judgment'', dismissed music as "more a matter of enjoyment than culture" and "less worth in the judgement of reason than any other of the fine arts" because of its lack of conceptual content, thus treating as a deficit the very feature of music that others celebrated. Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, ''Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism.
Biography
Born in Mohrun ...
, in contrast, regarded music as the highest of the arts because of its spirituality, which Herder attributed to the invisibility of sound. The ensuing arguments among musicians, composers, music historians and critics continue today.
Romantic debate
A group of Romantics
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
consisting of Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, ''Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism.
Biography
Born in Mohrun ...
, Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatis ...
, Jean Paul Richter
Jean-Paul Richter (7 June 1847 – 25 August 1937) was a German art historian.
Born in Dresden as the son of a theologian, Richter studied theology himself, becoming tutor to the young Alexander Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse. His appointment as ...
and E.T.A. Hoffmann gave rise to the idea of what can be labeled as "spiritual absolutism". In this respect, instrumental music transcends other arts and languages to become the discourse of a 'higher realm', an idea expressed in Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, published in 1813. These thinkers believed that music could be more emotionally powerful and stimulating without words. According to Richter, music would eventually 'outlast' the word.
Formalist debate
Formalism is the concept of music for music's sake, or that music's 'meaning' is entirely in its form. In this respect, music has no extra-musical meaning at all and is enjoyed by appreciation of its formal structure and technical construction. The 19th century music critic Eduard Hanslick
Eduard Hanslick (11 September 18256 August 1904) was an Austrian music critic, aesthetician and historian. Among the leading critics of his time, he was the chief music critic of the ''Neue Freie Presse'' from 1864 until the end of his life. H ...
argued that music could be enjoyed as pure sound and form, and that it needed no connotation of extra-musical elements to warrant its existence. He argued that in fact, these extra-musical ideas and images detracted from the beauty of the music.
Formalism therefore rejected genres such as opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...
, song
A song is a musical composition intended to be performed by the human voice. This is often done at distinct and fixed pitches (melodies) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs contain various forms, such as those including the repetitio ...
and tone poems as they conveyed explicit meanings or programmatic imagery. Symphonic forms were considered more aesthetically pure. (The choral finale of Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical ...
's Ninth Symphony, as well as the programmatic Sixth Symphony, became problematic to formalist critics who had championed the composer as a pioneer of the Absolute, especially with the late Beethoven string quartets). Carl Dahlhaus
Carl Dahlhaus (10 June 1928 – 13 March 1989) was a German musicologist who was among the leading postwar musicologists of the mid to late 20th-century. A prolific scholar, he had broad interests though his research focused on 19th- and 20th ...
described absolute music as music without a "concept, object, and purpose".
Opposition and objections to absolute music
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
was a vocal opponent of absolute music, a phrase he coined. Wagner considered the choral finale of Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical ...
's Ninth Symphony to be the proof that music works better with words, famously saying: "Where music can go no further, there comes the word ... the word stands higher than the tone." Wagner also called Beethoven's Ninth Symphony the death knell of the symphony, for he was far more interested in combining all forms of art with his .
Contemporary views
Today, the debate continues over whether music has, or ought to have, extramusical meaning or not. However, most contemporary views, reflecting ideas emerging from views of subjectivity in linguistic meaning
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
arising in cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are con ...
, as well as Kuhn's work on cultural biases in science and other ideas on meaning and aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...
(e.g. Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrians, Austrian-British people, British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy o ...
on cultural constructions in thought and language), appear to be moving
towards a consensus that music provides at least some sign
A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or me ...
ification or meaning, in terms of which it is ''understood''.
The cultural bases of musical understanding have been highlighted in Philip Bohlman
Philip Vilas Bohlman (born August 8, 1952) is an American ethnomusicologist.
Life and career
He is the Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago and a visiting pro ...
's work, who considers music as a form of cultural communication:
Bohlman has gone on to argue that the use of music, e.g. among the Jewish diaspora
The Jewish diaspora ( he, תְּפוּצָה, təfūṣā) or exile (Hebrew: ; Yiddish: ) is the dispersion of Israelites or Jews out of their ancient ancestral homeland (the Land of Israel) and their subsequent settlement in other parts of t ...
, was in fact a form of ''identity building''.
Susan McClary
Susan Kaye McClary (born October 2, 1946) is an American musicologist associated with " new musicology". Noted for her work combining musicology with feminist music criticism, McClary is professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University ...
has criticised the notion of 'absolute music', arguing that all music, whether explicitly programmatic or not, contains implicit programs that reflect the tastes, politics, aesthetic philosophies and social attitudes of the composer and their historical situation. Such scholars would argue that classical music is rarely about nothing, but reflects aesthetic tastes that are themselves influenced by culture, politics and philosophy. Composers are often bound up in a web of tradition and influence, in which they strive to consciously situate themselves in relation to other composers and styles. Lawrence Kramer, on the other hand, believes music has no means to reserve a "specific layer or pocket for meaning. Once it has been brought into sustainable connection with a structure of prejudgment, music simply becomes meaningful."
Music which appears to demand an interpretation, but is abstract enough to warrant objectivity (e.g. Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popu ...
's 6th Symphony), is what Lydia Goehr
Lydia Goehr is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Her research specialties include the philosophy of music, aesthetics, critical theory, the philosophy of history, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophy.
Early life and education
...
refers to as "double-sided autonomy". This happens when the formalist properties of music became attractive to composers because, having no meaning to speak of, music could be used to envision an alternative cultural and/or political order, while escaping the scrutiny of the censor (particularly common in Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, , group=n (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major compo ...
, most notably the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies).
Linguistic meaning
On the topic of musical meaning,
Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrians, Austrian-British people, British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy o ...
, at several points in his late diary ''Culture and Value'',[
] ascribes meaning to music, for instance, that in the finale,
a conclusion is being drawn, e.g.:
Jerrold Levinson has drawn extensively on Wittgenstein to comment:
See also
*
*Art music
Art music (alternatively called classical music, cultivated music, serious music, and canonic music) is music considered to be of high phonoaesthetic value. It typically implies advanced structural and theoretical considerationsJacques Siron, ...
*Gebrauchsmusik
() is a German term, meaning "utility music", for music that exists not only for its own sake, but which was composed for some specific, identifiable purpose. This purpose can be a particular historical event, like a political rally or a militar ...
*Impressionist music
Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music (mainly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries) whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, "conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject ...
*Musique concrète
Musique concrète (; ): " problem for any translator of an academic work in French is that the language is relatively abstract and theoretical compared to English; one might even say that the mode of thinking itself tends to be more schematic, ...
("Concrete music")
References
Further reading
*Chua, Daniel Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
*Cook, Nicholas Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1998)
*Dahlhaus, Carl The Idea of Absolute Music trans. by Roger Lustig (Chicago/London 1989; orig. Kassel, 1978)
*Goehr, Lydia The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992)
*Kivy, Peter ‘Absolute Music’ and the ‘New Musicology’ in Musicology and Sister Disciplines. Past, Present, Future. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the International Musicological Society, London 1997 ed. D. Greer, I. Rumbold and J. King (Oxford, 2000)
*Kramer, Lawrence Subjectivity Rampant! Music, Hermeneutics, and History in The Cultural Study of Music. A Critical Introduction ed. M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (New York and London, 2003)
Scruton, Roger. "Absolute music." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
*Williams, Alastair Constructing Musicology (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Aldershot, Hampshire, 2001)
*Wolff, Janet The ideology of autonomous art, in: Music and Society in The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception ed. R. Leppert and S. McClary (Cambridge, 1987)
*Young, James O. Critique of Pure Music (Oxford University Press, 2014)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Absolute Music
Modernism (music)
Musical analysis
Music genres