The aesthetic ideas underlying the absolute music derive from debates over the relative value of what were known in the early years of aesthetic theory as the fine arts. Kant, in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, dismissed music as "more enjoyment than culture" because of its lack of conceptual content, thus taking as a negative the very feature of music that others celebrated. Johann Gottfried Herder, in contrast, regarded music as the highest of the arts because of its spirituality, which Herder linked to the invisibility of sound. The ensuing arguments among musicians, composers, music historians and critics have, in effect, never stopped.
History
This ideal was developed over 50 years earlier for music styles of that time. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck formulated in 1799: "In instrumental music, however, art is independent and free, it prescribes itself only its laws, it fantasizes playfully and without purpose, and yet it meets and reaches the highest..." ETA Hoffmann (review of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, 1810) thus linked a primacy of music among the arts: it alone was "purely romantic " in the sense of the autonomy of the artwork.
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner coined the expression Absolute Music as an antithesis to music drama and Gesamtkunstwerk, those ideals that he himself represented. Absolute music is a historical aberration in that the music has been isolated from the rest of the arts and from life. With Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the climax of this development was reached and already overcome by the addition of chorus and lyrics. Wagner's musical drama was the logical consequence (program for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 1846). Music should not itself be "purpose", but must remain a "means" (opera and drama).
Eduard Hanslick
Eduard Hanslick, on the other hand, developed a positive aesthetic of Absolute Music in his essay Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854): The beauty of a tone poem is "a specifically musical... that is independent and indefatigable in content coming from the outside, only in the sounds and their artistic Connection lies. "Instrumental music can not be surpassed by anything; "Only she is pure, absolute art of sound." He, too, drew this ideal above all on the instrumental music of Viennese classical music, especially that of Beethoven.
Discussion
The contrast between "absolute music" and " program music" became decisive for the musical-aesthetic discussion in the age of musical romanticism. Proponents and opponents of the ideal referred to Beethoven's works and defended their own musical genre as the only legitimate continuation of his tradition. Franz Liszt, for example, considered the classical compositional principles of Motivational Work, Thematic Development, Implementation, and Repetition of a sonata form not as irrefutable rules, but as a changeable expression of poetic thoughts, which alone leads the free fantasy of the composer (Berlioz and his Harold Symphony, 1855).
In the 1920s, the absolute music, which appeared to some as the surviving legacy of the last century, the utility music as the ideal of a social integration of all musical was held. The New Music of the 20th Century, on the other hand, sought to increase the liberation from the extraneous music by liberating music from known functions and associations.
The Austrian composer Günther Rabl understands "absolute music" to mean electroacoustic music, in which the process of creating music using the means of the tape and the computer is temporally independent of the time flow of the created music itself.
The Spiritualist debate
A group of Romantics consisting of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Jean Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann gave rise to the idea of what can be labeled as "spiritual absolutism". In this respect, instrumental music transcends other arts and languages to become the discourse of a ‘higher realm’ — rooted greatly in Hoffmann’s famous review of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, published in 1810. These protagonists believed that music could be more emotionally powerful and stimulating without words. According to Richter, music would eventually ‘outlast’ the word.
The Formalist debate
‘Formalism’ is the concept of ‘music for music’s sake’ and refers to instrumental music. In this respect, music has no meaning at all and is enjoyed by appreciation of its ‘formal’ structure and technical construction. The 19th century music critic Eduard Hanslick argued that music could be enjoyed as pure sound and form, that it needed no connotation of extra-musical elements to warrant its existence. In fact, these extra-musical ideas detracted from the beauty of the music. The 'Absolute', in this case, is the ‘purity’ of the art.
“Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.” — Eduard Hanslick
Formalism therefore rejected genres such as opera, song and tone poems as they conveyed explicit meanings or programmatic imagery. Symphonic forms were considered more aesthetically pure. (The choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as well as the programmatic Sixth Symphony, became problematic to formalist critics who had championed the composer as a pioneer of the ‘Absolute’, especially with the late quartets).
Carl Dahlhaus describes absolute music as music without a "concept, object, and purpose".
Opposition and objections to absolute music
The majority of opposition to the idea of instrumental music being ‘absolute’ came from Richard Wagner. It seemed ludicrous to him that art could exist without meaning; for him it had no right to exist.
Wagner considered the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be the proof that music works better with words, famously saying:
“Where music can go no further, there comes the word… the word stands higher than the tone.” — Wagner[This quote needs a citation]
Wagner also called Beethoven's Ninth Symphony the death knell of the Symphony, for he was far more interested in combining all forms of art with his Gesamtkunstwerk.
Pure music is defined as any musical work containing no extra-musical element. The concept of pure music is essentially opposed to that of program music.
The cantata, the song, the lied, the oratorio, the mass etc., are genres necessarily determined by a text: this one generating ideas and meanings foreign to the musical language, all vocal music is therefore music to program. In the same way, any music for dance or for the stage - ballet, musical comedy, stage music, opera, etc. - and any descriptive music - symphonic poem, among others -, also fall under program music.
In absolute terms, pure music is therefore an exclusively instrumental music, devoid of any relation with a poetry, a scenic action, an idea, an image, etc. A sonata, a symphony, a concerto, a fugue, etc., thus theoretically the forms of pure music. But the limit between pure music and program music is not always easy to determine.
For example, partition the Four Seasons of Vivaldi well be made up of a series of four concertos, it can hardly be regarded as pure music, because it contains many descriptive elements.
The problem of such a definition (which claims besides the "absolute" without really basing its claim) is that it becomes unable to explain the musical emotion. Even if the music was simply a sound form in movement, the quality of this form should have something that explains the interest it arouses. But it would then imply that "pure" music would have something extra-musical, which would be a contradiction.
Contemporary views
Today, the debate continues over whether music has meaning or not. However, most contemporary views, reflecting ideas emerging from views of subjectivity in linguistic meaning arising in cognitive linguistics, as well as Kuhn's work on cultural biases in science and other ideas on meaning and aesthetics (e.g. Wittgenstein on cultural constructions in thought and language), appear to be moving towards a consensus that music provides at least some signification or meaning, in terms of which it is understood.
The cultural bases of musical understanding have been highlighted in Philip Bohlman's work, who considers music as a form of cultural communication:
There are those who believe that music represents nothing other than itself. I argue that we are constantly giving it new and different abilities to represent who we are.
Bohlman has gone on to argue that the use of music, e.g. among the Jewish diaspora, was in fact a form of identity building.
Susan McClary has critiqued the notion of ‘absolute music’, arguing that all music, whether explicitly programmatic or not, contains implicit programs that reflect the tastes, politics, aesthetic philosophies and social attitudes of the composer and their historical situation. Such scholars would argue that classical music is rarely about ‘nothing’, but reflects aesthetic tastes that are themselves influenced by culture, politics and philosophy. Composers are often bound up in a web of tradition and influence, in which they strive to consciously situate themselves in relation to other composers and styles. Lawrence Kramer, on the other hand, believes music has no means to reserve a “specific layer or pocket for meaning. Once it has been brought into sustainable connection with a structure of prejudgment, music simply becomes meaningful.”
Music which appears to demand an interpretation, but is abstract enough to warrant objectivity (e.g. Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony), is what Lydia Goehr refers to as ‘double-sided autonomy.’ This happens when the formalist properties of music became attractive to composers because, having ‘no meaning to speak of’, music could be used to envision an alternative cultural and/or political order, while escaping the scrutiny of the censor (particularly common in Shostakovich, most notably the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies).
Linguistic meaning
On the topic of musical meaning, Wittgenstein, at several points in his late diary Culture and Value, ascribes meaning to music, for instance, that in the finale, a conclusion is being ‘drawn’, e.g.:
“[one] can point to particular places in a tune by Schubert and say: look, that is the point of the tune, this is where the thought comes to a head.” (p.47)
Recently, Jerrold Levinson has drawn extensively on Wittgenstein to comment, in the Journal of Music and Meaning:
Intelligible music stands to literal thinking in precisely the same relation as does intelligible verbal discourse. If that relation be not exemplification but instead, say, expression, then music and language are, at any rate, in the same, and quite comfortable, boat.
Source from Wikipedia
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