Absolute Music

Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

“Absolute music” names an idea, an aesthetic concept, a regulative construct, a repertoire, and an aspiration. The term also engages a range of broader claims about aesthetic autonomy, or the possibility of aesthetic experience more generally. This chapter investigates how and why the aspiration towards autonomy has seemed so necessary—and so powerfully subversive—for musical thinkers at certain times in history. It traces the entanglements and misalignments of the various meanings and uses of these ideas, and brings these insights into the remit of contemporary debates about music’s ineffability, and its capacity to facilitate resistance and political agency.

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-184
Author(s):  
Leonard Diepeveen

This chapter begins with an account of the Blind Man’s defense of Duchamp’s Fountain, using it to make a more general point that inferring intent is central to the aesthetic experience and meaning of art in general, and in highly particular ways in modernist works of art. Inferring intent is inevitable, and it is always uncertain and messy. Modernist works of art highlighted that tension, presenting unclear signs of intent and making uncertainty central to the value of their aesthetic experience. Particularly at modernism’s avant-garde edges, readers and viewers uncertainly perform intent in modernist artworks, an experience which implies a particular argument about the place of intent and fraud in aesthetic experience. The chapter ends with an inductive turn on the basis of this argument, presenting a theory of intent’s function in aesthetic experience, and its relation to ideas of aesthetic autonomy.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-353
Author(s):  
Zeynep Arslan

Through comparative literature research and qualitative analysis, this article considers the development of Alevi identity and political agency among the diaspora living in a European democratic context. This affects the Alevi emergence as political actors in Turkey, where they have no official recognition as a distinct religious identity. New questions regarding their identity and their aspiration to be seen as a political actor confront this ethno-religious group defined by common historical trauma, displacement, massacre, and finally emigration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-248
Author(s):  
Julien Weber

This article is about the grotesque in Baudelaire. While Baudelaire's famous essay on laughter plays an important role in contemporary theories of grotesque aesthetics, his own poetic production is often left aside. In this article, I discuss how the grotesque manifests itself in works by Baudelaire that seem a priori irrelevant because of their ostensible use of ‘comique significatif’, a sort of antithesis of the grotesque. Through a discussion of Pauvre Belgique! And ‘Le Chien et le Flacon’, I argue that the baudelairian grotesque most powerfully intervenes in the mode of a distortion of the intended meaning, which leads me to distinguish its reading from a properly ‘aesthetic’ experience.


2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Grant

In recent years, music theorists and analysts have devoted a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of hypermeter, drawing some of their most representative examples from the late works of Haydn. Although this recent trend in analysis has shed much light on Haydn’s music, it has left questions of history distinct from the mode of listening it engages. This article argues that the way we understand conceptualizations of listening and aesthetic experience can greatly inform the way that we understand hypermeter and the question of style in history. Drawing on eighteenth-century theories of music and literature, it recontextualizes Haydn’s hypermetric style with respect to a larger world of aesthetic experience.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-407
Author(s):  
Zdenko Š Širka

Abstract This article finds its inspiration in the new interpretations of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which underline the turn in his later period, and which focus on the conception of aesthetic experience as an experience of transcendence. The main thesis is that the understanding of artworks, as Gadamer describes them in contrast to the Kantian subjectification of aesthetics, can be paralleled with the way Orthodox biblical theology struggles to approach Holy Scripture in the context of Church and Tradition. The aim of this article is to bring new material to the growing reception of Gadamer among Orthodox scholars, and to initiate further discussion on the topic by showing the parallels and areas where this reception could continue.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Gertrud Koch

Im Zentrum steht der Begriff des Experiments, der mit Kants Begriff der Lebendigkeit als zentralem Topos der ästhetischen Erfahrung auf die 〉Animation〈 im Film bezogen wird, insoweit beide einen lebenswissenschaftlichen Kern haben. Insbesondere in einer Auseinandersetzung mit Eisensteins Poetik des 〉Plasmatischen〈 wird die experimentelle Übertragung einer lebenswissenschaftlichen Metapher in eine Ästhetik des Films diskutiert, die von der Animation ausgeht. </br></br>The paper discusses the notion of »experiment« and relates it – via Kant's concept of liveliness, which is a central topos of aesthetic experience – to »animation« in film, insofar as both essentially refer to »life sciences.« Drawing upon the example of Eisenstein's poetics of the »plasmic,« the paper discusses the transferal of a metaphor from life sciences to an aesthetics of cinema based on animation.


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