Abstract
The nineteenth century gave birth to the idea of absolute music—(mainly) instrumental music that, due to its lack of mimetic effects and its pure, immaterial form, was thought to transcend the non-musical world and expose its essences; it was thought to forge a more profound connection to the world than could art forms allied with language. This chapter surveys classic formulations of this idea by Schelling, E. T. A. Hoffman, and other German intellectuals. Especially useful will be Schopenhauer’s (and Susanne Langer’s) notion that music is a symbol not primarily of particular emotions but of the dynamics of experience that underlie various emotions.This chapter also locates a precedent of absolute music in Kantian thought and an heir to it in Adorno.
Art is autonomous and it is not.
—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Giorgio Vasari, a biographer of Michelangelo, marvels at the realism of the artist’s sculpture Pietà—of every muscle, vein, and limb—but then goes on to state that Michelangelo has produced “such perfection as Nature can but rarely produce in the flesh” (his italics). Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects; quoted in Treitler 1989, pp. 67–68. As for the novel, another supposed mimetic artform par excellence, Wolfgang Iser has argued that it is not realistic but rather comprises the frame by which we configure reality. It represents, if anything, the faculty of memory, by which we make sense of reality, bringing order to multiplicity. “The traditional realistic novel can no longer be regarded as a mirror-reflection of reality, but is, rather, a paradigm of the structure of memory…” (1978, p. 125). More simply, fiction “must always in some way transcend the world to which it refers” (ibid., 182).
- 3.
See Subotnik’s critique of empirical, Anglo-American musicology in 1991, pp. 3–14.
- 4.
I simplify here for the sake of exposition; topoi almost always operate in tandem, thus generating more complex meanings than any one topic could on its own.
- 5.
Allanbrook 1983, p. 6 (my italics). A similar and very common phenomenon in the Classical period (and to some extent in other styles as well) is that of one instrument imitating another, as when the piano imitates the voice or orchestra, and of one genre imitating another, as when the solo sonata imitates a concerto through virtuosic passagework (usually in approaching a major formal juncture). Also regarding concerto, Charles Rosen notes that “mimesis of the tutti-solo alternation is standard throughout late eighteenth century music of whatever genre” (1988, p. 77). Here again, such music-to-music reference connotes emotional states—the evocation of concerto in a sonata, for instance, generates no small amount of anticipation and excitement—but such paramusical reference is conspicuously mediated by intra-musical reference.
- 6.
Kant 1790, p. 104. Imagination grasps a manifold while understanding unifies it.
- 7.
For this reason, Peter de Bolla (2002, p. 27) characterizes reflective judgments as “radically subjective”— the universal follows from the individual judgment rather than the reverse.
- 8.
Kant 1790, p. 57.
- 9.
I have provided barely a thumbnail sketch of Kant’s aesthetics—only as much as was needed for our present purposes. For an extensive exegesis, see Guyer 1997.
- 10.
I should clarify that Kant’s actual views on music (as laid out in Sects. 53 and 54 of the Third Critique) are cursory and notoriously deficient. Briefly, he considered music incapable of stimulating the free play of cognition and thus incapable of being an object of beauty. (Peter Kivy attributes this verdict to Kant’s lack of familiarity with Classical form and syntax; see Kivy’s 1993 commentary on the suggestive yet ultimately unsuccessful elements of Kant’s musical theory.) In what follows, I shall extrapolate from Kant’s general theory a more charitable and promising Kantian view of music than he himself allowed.
- 11.
See Bonds 1991.
- 12.
However, as Dahlhaus (1991, p. 163 ff.) reminds us, musical logic does not depend exclusively upon linear, causal relations. For, on the one hand, not all contiguous events are processive (“not everything that ‘proceeds’… is a ‘process’”), and on the other, non-contiguous events may be related—sometimes music evinces non-linear logic.
- 13.
Schenker 1910, p. 291 (his italics). Interestingly, though Schenker employs an organicist metaphor here, and in later work fervently espouses organicist ideology overall, here he emphasizes that such causality is fabricated rather than real: “the artistic instinct discovered in the compulsion to prepare and resolve a dissonance a most welcome means of feigning a kind of musical causality and necessity at least from harmony to harmony (ibid., 291, first italics his, second mine). In fact, in an earlier writing, “The Spirit of Musical Technique” (Schenker 1895), he holds music to be essentially inorganic.
- 14.
Subotnik 1991, p. 196. However, Subotnik continues with the caveat that one cannot assume such musical reason to be absolute and invariant, for even “pure” musical logic needs to be interpreted by humans who introduce elements external to such logic. Classical music as a self-explanatory mechanism, then, is at once universal and contingent, somewhat dependent on the systems of meaning people apply to music.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
“Even in cases where the composer himself has employed pictorial tags in talking about his work—calling one symphony ‘Pastoral,’ one movement ‘Brook Scene’ and another ‘Jolly Concourse of Peasants’—these tropes are properly reducible to purely musical elements rather than standing for actual objects expressed through music” (Nietzsche 1871, p. 44).
- 17.
This duplicitous aspect of the aesthetic is nicely captured by Henry Kingsbury’s recollection of a studio teacher who counseled his students to abide by the letter and law of the score but somehow convinced them that this is what they subjectively preferred. “A fundamental principle of Goldmann’s teaching was that students must play what is printed in the score, and yet that they must not play something simply because it is written in the score, but rather because they feel it that way” (Kingsbury 1988, p. 87, my italics). I return to the politics of interpretation in the next chapter.
- 18.
Of course, one must be careful not to overgeneralize, for some eighteenth-century writers were skeptical of musical mimesis, or qualified it in some respect. Christoph Koch, for example, writing in 1802, states,
Some… similarities exist between natural phenomena and musical tones and one can transfer them to music; but music betrays its nature when it takes over such descriptions, since its one and only object is to depict the feelings of the heart, and not the picture of inanimate things. Most devices for tone painting are objectionable… since they divert the attention from the principal content to accessory things (Musikalisches Lexikon, p. 924. Quoted in Ratner 1980, p. 25).
For another example, Johann Sulzer, while condoning mimesis and the evocation of affects (in all of the fine arts, including music), deems it necessary that these arts capture not merely the sensuous form of a phenomenon but also its inner essence. Correlatively, he eschewed artistic perception weighed too heavily toward the sensory; rather, the perceiver need also register her own inner sense of the artwork, “where attention is directed from the object itself to what the soul is feeling…. In this way, one’s mind loses sight of the object itself, and feels all the more its animated effects. The soul becomes, in essence, all feeling; it knows of nothing outside, but only of what is inside itself” (1774, p. 33). What begins as attention to the sensory, mimetic qualities of an artwork eventuates in self-reflection and self-absorption, such that the perceiver grasps something essential not only about the depicted object but also about her own emotional sensibility.
- 19.
Ibid., 146. Also see Hoffman 1813.
- 20.
- 21.
Translated taken from by Bonds 1997, p. 403. Also, Ian Biddle states that music, for Schelling, evokes “the externality of the universe without violating the boundaries of its own ontology” (1996, p. 35).
- 22.
I use the 8th edition from 1891, page numbers from which will be cited in the text.
- 23.
I adopt the next two paragraphs from Swinkin 2013, p. 101.
- 24.
Busoni expresses an almost identical sentiment: music “set[s] in vibration our human moods…. But not the moving cause itself of those spiritual affections;—not the joy over an avoided danger…. an emotional state, yes, but not the psychic species of this emotion…. Is it possible to imagine how a poor but contented man could be represented by music? The contentment, the soul-state, can be interpreted by music; but where does the poverty appear…? (1911, p. 13). For a more recent argument along these lines, see Robinson 1987, which holds that music can describe an object but not depict it; it can posit a predicate but not a subject.
- 25.
While I subscribe to musical form embodying generalized dynamics of sentient experience, I do not deem that incompatible with music’s ability to embody particular feelings. I pursue this idea later on, and also refer you to Swinkin 2013.
- 26.
Schopenhauer 1818–1819; translation taken from Le Huray and Day 1981, p. 329 (my italics). (See Budd 1985, pp. 76–103 for a critique of some of these principles.) Nascent ideas regarding the essentialist function of art can be traced back to British aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, as discussed by James Sambrook, likens the painter to the “philosophic naturalist who determines the general form of a species from the minute examination of many specimens” (Sambrook 1993, p. 151). Art shares with the natural sciences the capacity to abstract from and generalize about natural phenomena; this capacity was considered superior to merely replicating contingent features.
- 27.
Meyer 1956 also subscribes to the view that aesthetic affect is undifferentiated.
- 28.
Before proceeding, a caveat is in order. In the above, very brief survey of the notion of absolute music, I have perhaps committed an error of which Sanna Pederson accuses Dahlhaus: glossing over differences among various thinkers’ use of the concept, implying that it was used more uniformly or consistently in the course of its history than it really was. While my survey is less nuanced than Pederson’s account, it is adequate for our present purposes. Also, Pederson takes issue with Dahlhaus’s assertion that Hanslick, in claiming that instrumental music epitomized pure, “tonally moving” forms, implied that such music enjoyed metaphysical status. On the contrary, Pederson claims: Hanslick deliberately omitted references to absolute music in all editions of On the Musically Beautiful subsequent to the first, precisely because he wanted to uphold a notion of pure form that possessed no other, extra-musical intimations (Pederson 2009, pp. 251–253). Yet, I think Hanslick’s initial commitment to the idea of absolute music is not entirely negated by his subsequent expurgations.
- 29.
Cookpoints out that the categories in which musical phenomena are placed are contingent: what is considered a work in one time, place, or culture might be considered a piece in another; what is considered an instance of a work (a token) in one might be considered a work (a type) in another. However, he cautions, the musical work is not only a social construction, for “underlying any such categorization is some kind of material trace… which may, or may not, afford a given interpretation” (Cook 1999, p. 203).
- 30.
Bojan Bujic states that while notation was originally an aide-mémoire, it subsequently became emancipated from this function, and “the whole subsequent course of Western notation represents a move away from memory towards the state in which a written document can stand on its own… representing the musical work” (Bujic 1993, p. 134). Cf. Adorno 2006, p. 71, where he disputes the notion that musical notation was ever an aid to memory.
- 31.
- 32.
Likewise, as Erinn Knyt explains, Busoni holds that music
could be shaped in response to a human idea drawn from the composer’s psyche or surroundings. This is probably one of the most original aspects of his notion of the absolute in music. He idealized forms constructed in relation to cultural ideas rather than genres…. Busoni’s Ideen were unlike explicit programmes in that they provided the impetus for musical concepts that influenced texture, structures [and so on] without providing any narrative or explicit images. Yet they were also not specifically musical. They had to be translated into an abstract musical idea, an Einfall, that then had to receive concrete forms in tones and rhythms (Knyt 2012, p. 46).
- 33.
Rumph 2005 discusses this epigraph
- 34.
Nietzsche expresses a similar sentiment: “The poet cannot tell us anything that was not already contained, with a most universal validity, in such music as prompted him to his figurative discourse. The cosmic symbolism of music resists any adequate treatment by language, for the simple reason that music, in referring to primordial contradiction and pain, symbolizes a sphere which is both earlier than appearance and beyond it. Once we set it over against music, all appearance becomes a mere analogy” (1871, p. 46, my italics).
- 35.
On a similar note, Reynolds 1988 argues that in An die Ferne Geliebte, Beethoven ingeniously portrays the basic dynamic of separation–integration as alluded to by the text within purely musical terms, through a process of motivic integration. That is, motives that were initially separate (texturally and temporally) are later, in the sixth song, amalgamated; the motivic process encodes the initial alienation and subsequent rapprochement of the two lovers. Yet, Reynolds is careful to emphasize that, although Beethoven’s music does indeed represent this “underlying idea of action… Beethoven’s representational approach goes beyond mimesis and thus cannot be considered programmatic” (1988, p. 193). That is, the motion-schema embedded in the music does not merely serve to depict the text but also to engender intrinsic musical sense—an immanent structural process— and, along with that, to express a universal dynamic of experience that transcends the more particular circumstance depicted by the text.
- 36.
Adorno 1962, p. 75. Deleuze and Guattari would likely disagree with the last clause, as they detect in Wagner’s leitmotif technique a vehicle for musical autonomy: as an opera unfolds, leitmotifs “increasingly enter into conjunction… become autonomous from the dramatic action… and independent of characters and landscapes; they themselves become melodic landscapes” (1987, p. 319). Likewise, Schoenberg 1932 eschews text painting and professes to use “representational words”—words that would seem to require such painting—as he would any other word: to enhance musical structure, to further “the immediate, vivid rendering of the whole and of its parts” (32). Schoenberg, in turn, cites a precedent for this approach in Schubert, who, in a desire to compose a “comprehensive melody… may pass over a salient textual feature…. a genuine melody will arise relatively seldom from a procedure which strongly emphasizes the text” (41).
- 37.
Langer 1953, p. 153 (her italics). Langer terms this phenomenon the “principle of assimilation.”
- 38.
Even Schenker asserts that “seldom do the masters create a work of significance without some definable impetus from the outside world,” and affirms that programmatic content and musical form are thoroughly compatible (1905–1909, p. 52).
- 39.
Hegel 1820–1829, p. 46. Treitler (1989, p. 211) makes a similar point regarding Mozart: his instrumental music does not render concrete scenarios (of the sort found in his operas) more psychologically complex; rather, his operatic music renders psychological complexity (of the sort found in his instrumental music) more concrete—it frames the abstract psychical patterns embodied in symphonies and sonatas by particular circumstances.
- 40.
- 41.
Schenker 1926 speaks to this point, noting that Chopin’s Waltz in A-flat, op. 34, no. 1 actually consists of “three short waltzes” that are connected by means of a large arpeggiation. “What appears to be a loose assemblage in the manner of a potpourri reveals itself… to be a tightly organized whole” (7).
- 42.
Also see Hatten 2004 , Chap. 8 where he discusses the motivic import of resonance and articulation in Schubert’s posthumous A major Piano Sonata, and Littlewood 2004, where he points out that in Brahms’s op. 9, the portato articulation becomes “a motivic idea in itself, independent of its one-time patron, repeated notes” (263).
- 43.
Leistra-Jones 2013 expertly traces these two divergent and largely coextensive paths in nineteenth- century performance culture, in which Brahms and Joachim epitomized performative sincerity and authenticity, Liszt theatricality and self-display. However, the former, Leistra-Jones argues, is no less a self-conscious mode of performing than is the latter; Joachim, in particular, ‘performed’ authenticity—’performed’, that is, a supposed lack of performativity!
- 44.
By analogy, Hans-Georg Gadamer asserts that “changing the established forms is no less a kind of connection with the tradition than defending the established forms,” “Replik,” cited in Hoy 1978, p. 127.
- 45.
Cone 1986. Page numbers will be cited in text.
- 46.
Just as, according to Adorno, there is no pure form, Cone implies there is no purely objective analysis: the analyst’s understanding and formulation of ostensibly purely music-structural relations will necessarily be conditioned by the non-musical experiences to which the analyst can relate, and that he thinks resonates with the piece. More on this presently; also see Guck 1998.
- 47.
Similar narratives have been adduced of Schubert’s posthumous B-flat piano sonata (Fisk 1997) and of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, second movement (Guck 1994). In fact, we might deem my reading an instance of a veritable musical-narrative archetype. Incidentally, Cone’s analysis could also perhaps be construed in terms of a psychological scenario: (1) one undergoes (or recalls having undergone) a problematic or anomalous experience and its resultant feeling (measure 12); (2) these are repressed (measure 13); (3) because the repression is not entirely successful, the repressed returns in other forms (measure 16); (4) the problematic feeling seems to be resolved or understood (measure 47); (5) this resolution turns out to be innocuous or even illusory—the repressed feeling is much more complex and problematic than initially thought, and thus recurs in intensified form, as an emotional outburst or neurotic symptom (measure 65).
- 48.
For a dense theoretical exposition of music as social homology, see Shepherd and Wicke 1997.
- 49.
See Burnham 1989.
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Swinkin, J. (2015). Musical Autonomy and Musical Meaning: A Historical Overview. In: Teaching Performance: A Philosophy of Piano Pedagogy. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12514-5_2
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