Absolute Music

Abstract

Abstract What we think music is shapes how we hear it. This book traces the history of the idea of pure—"absolute"—music from Pythagoras to the present, with special emphasis on efforts to reconcile the irreducible essence of the art with its profound effects on the human spirit. The core of this study focuses on the period 1850–1935, beginning with the collision between Richard Wagner and the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. Wagner, who coined the term "absolute music" in 1846, used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For him, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. Hanslick considered this quality of isolation a guarantor of purity: music could be understood only in terms of itself. Hanslick had few followers among musicians during his lifetime (1825–1904). By 1920, however, absolute music was being endorsed by leading modernists, including both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The key impetus for this change came from discourse not about music but rather about the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Oxford University Press eBooks, 2014 · DOI ↗