absolute music
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2021 ◽  

Studies of program music explore ways in which extra-musical material is expressed and interpreted through music. Conceptions of program music are broadly construed and vary throughout history in correlation with various aesthetic and philosophical perspectives—narrowly defined, programmatic compositions include an extra-musical program describing the musical expression, while a broader definition considers evocative titles, allusive musical material, and conventional musical significations as vehicles of extra-musical meaning. The question of aesthetic value arises in the debate surrounding the ability of music to communicate extra-musical ideas and the quality of music that claims to do so. This question is extensively explored through the polemics of the 19th-century “War of the Romantics,” pitting programmatic music against “absolute music.” Musical and theoretical writings of figures such as Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Hanslick provide rich source material informing many studies on program music. The distinction between program music and absolute music is blurred through various approaches to deriving meaning from both types of music. Theories of narrativity propose methods of interpreting formal structures, tonal progressions, and thematic devices interacting in ways reminiscent of literary narrative. Semiotic approaches explore meanings that arise from conventional significations of genre, style, and “topics,” evoking cultural understandings of social position, setting, and affect. Applying interpretive strategies such as these to programmatic music allows for hermeneutic readings mapping the extra-musical program onto the musical events to explore meaningful points of intersection or contradiction. Further studies draw connections to composer biography and sociohistorical context, positioning the music in philosophical perspectives and reception. Broader cultural and political situations inform readings of underlying implications such as nationalism or social commentary. Current studies of program music explore musical narratives in nuanced contexts that parse the historical and cultural atmospheres surrounding composers, their music, and reception to propose new readings and frames of interpretation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. S193
Author(s):  
Zhengxian Liu ◽  
Lan Yang ◽  
Siyu Long ◽  
Junce Wang ◽  
Bingxin Huang ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Anne Searcy

Alexei Ratmansky’s works challenge the way that Western critics and choreographers split ballet into abstract and narrative categories. This chapter explains how Western ballet arrived at the division between abstract and narrative. This developed out of the ideology of absolute music, the understanding that music could not have any meaning other than a purely formal one. During the Cold War, American choreographers such as George Balanchine took up the belief in absolute music in order to push against Soviet models of ballet. The Cold War also encouraged Western ballet experts to conflate abstraction with progress. Within this context, the chapter analyzes Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons (2006), which can appear as both abstract and narrative to its audiences. Ratmansky’s career thus challenges many long-held assumptions in the West about forward progress in ballet.


Author(s):  
Douglas W. Shadle

An aesthetic conflict between advocates of abstract instrumental music (or “absolute music”) and advocates of instrumental music that tells stories (or “program music”) raged throughout Europe and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. American critics assessed Dvořák’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies through the lens of this conflict as they premiered throughout the 1880s and 1890s. But listeners could not reach a consensus about where along the aesthetic spectrum his music fell. Which direction the composer’s new symphony might take therefore remained an open question until its 1893 world premiere in New York, when the results surprised everyone.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.


Author(s):  
Laurie McManus

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion), and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or “priest of music,” with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms’s bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could explain why Brahms never married while leaving the composer open to speculation about his health and masculinity. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological frameworks that scrutinized the composer’s physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.


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.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Abbate ◽  
Michael Gallope

Ineffability marks an intellectually productive, technologically mediated, and socially meaningful encounter with the experiential impact of musical sound. Repositioning ineffability in this way contests, in strong terms, previous scholarship associating ineffability with conservative conceptions of absolute music or prohibitions on speaking. In support of our argument, we foreground key elements of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s writings on improvisation and musical technique and stage a critique of Theodor Adorno’s treatment of the ineffable as needlessly attached to metaphors of language. We conclude by contending that this broadened conception of music’s ineffability may open a path towards a more inclusive musical aesthetics, one that is unmoored from normative conceptions of musical language, that is modest about music’s ability to enact scholarly ideals for political resistance, and that embraces the many ways music elicits vernacular forms of wisdom and speculation.


Author(s):  
Paul Boghossian

This chapter revisits the classic questions whether absolute music can express extra-musical meaning and whether such meaning should be thought of as playing an important role in our understanding and appreciation of music. It argues that music’s expressive ability plays a central role in our conception of its phenomenology and value—in our perception of music as expressive and in its capacity to move us, both in the understudied generic sense, and in the sense of arousing specific emotions in us. It examines a type of scepticism about music’s expressive ability made influential by Eduard Hanslick and considers to what extent it can be answered. The chapter concludes that, while the extreme scepticism espoused by Hanslick cannot be sustained, his discussion teaches us deep lessons about the expressive indeterminacy involved in music. The chapter illustrates some of the issues it deals with through an analysis of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major and explores the connection between meaning in music and meaning in poetry.


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