23/8/2017 Absolute Music - Late Twentieth-and Early Twenty-first-century Perspectives - Musical, Press, University, and Idea - JRank Articles

Absolute Music - Late Twentieth-and Early Twenty-first-century

Perspectives
musical press university idea

The last few decades of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century have seen renewed and often highly
skeptical interest in the claims of music's absoluteness alongside an increasingly entrenched advocacy, the latter reinforced by
the growth of musical analysis as a discipline. Carl Dahlhaus has historicized the concept, grounding it in Germanic
philosophical and musical thought. Many have argued persuasively that the idea is fundamentally a fiction, that music is
always referential to a variety of contexts, some historical and others acquired through reception. Most of these arguments
have focused either on a consideration of musical narrative (i.e., the way that music may be understood to tell stories
(Anthony Newcomb, Lawrence Kramer, and Susan McClary) or on musical semiotics, of how music has continued to develop
an evolving system of referential gestures redolent of the older "doctrine of the affections" (Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Leonard
Ratner, and Wye Allanbrook). If "absolute music" has indeed been a fiction, it has been a useful one from many perspectives,
helping to enable the experience of music as a uniquely powerful art medium. Under the aegis of its absoluteness, which
renders its shapes and gestures officially neutral, music has been capable of reinforcing—but with full deniability—a full array
of values and ideas, and of projecting, within its "meaningless" interplay of definiteness and vagueness, phantasmal versions
of a re-imagined reality.

See also Composition, Musical; Harmony; Idealism; Sacred and Profane.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bent, Ian. Analysis. New York: Norton; Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan Press, 1987.

Dahlhaus, Carl. The Idea of Absolute Music. Translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Hanslick, Eduard. On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. Translated
and edited by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1986.

Kramer, Lawrence. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002.

McClary, Susan. "Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony." In
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie, 326–344. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Newcomb, Anthony. "Once More between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's Second Symphony." 19th-Century
Music 7, no. 3 (April 1984): 233–250.

Treitler, Leo. "Mozart and the Idea of Absolute Music." In Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination, 176–214.
Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Raymond Knapp

Citing this material

Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this
website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading
unbiased, factual, and accurate information.

Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.

<a href="http://science.jrank.org/pages/8180/Absolute-Music-Late-Twentieth-Early-Twenty-First-Century-
Perspectives.html">Absolute Music - Late Twentieth-and Early Twenty-first-century Perspectives</a>

http://science.jrank.org/pages/8180/Absolute-Music-Late-Twentieth-Early-Twenty-First-Century-Perspectives.html 1/2
23/8/2017 Absolute Music - Late Twentieth-and Early Twenty-first-century Perspectives - Musical, Press, University, and Idea - JRank Articles

User Comments

Copyright © 2017 Net Industries and its Licensors – All Rights Reserved – Terms of Use

http://science.jrank.org/pages/8180/Absolute-Music-Late-Twentieth-Early-Twenty-First-Century-Perspectives.html 2/2