Toward the Perception of Subjective Expression
The idea of artistic expression as an outward manifestation of the self arose in literature and philosophy at least two generations before it came to be applied to music. Lyric poetry in particular provided a conceptual model for perceiving art as a form of autobiography; Goethe and Wordsworth encouraged such a reading of their works. In the meantime, philosophers were questioning the very nature of the self, and particularly the unconscious, which is to say, the primordial self. They began to recognize that while the unconscious might defy observation, its products could provide indirect evidence of its workings, and they regarded artworks as a synthesis of conscious and unconscious thought and as such capable of offering at least an occluded window onto the nature of the true inner self.