Aesthetic autonomy has a specific, logical corollary in one of the central creative practices it underpins: the phenomenon of music composed, performed and listened to by and for itself. This book considers how aesthetic theory is embedded within music itself, and how this embedment crucially informs all our efforts to think about music differently from other arts. The Aesthetic Within Music and Philosophy as Autonomous Practice Kevin O Regan
Argument: The argument proposed in this book is that the emergence of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, has a specific logical corollary in one of the most central creative practices that it underpins, the phenomenon of music composed, performed and listened to by and for itself. My premise is that particular pieces of music inherently embody aesthetic attitudes that were current at the time of their creation. This questions the accepted notion that aesthetic theory had subsequently to be significantly adapted in order to cope with the artistic innovations posed by the expanding creativity of autonomous music. Rather than considering music as simply having an impact on aesthetic theory, I consider, using philosophical analyses grounded in practical descriptions of music, how aesthetic theory is embedded within music itself, and how this embedment crucially informs all our efforts to think about music differently from other arts. By proposing that individual pieces of music inherently exhibit (to a greater or lesser extent) aesthetic autonomy as an idea in their conception and production, I provide a new theoretical basis for the common experience of listening to music absolutely. High Level Design (A) The aims of this book, chapter by chapter, are to (1) propose criteria for the identification of key historical sources in music aesthetics and analyze and assess significant content from these sources; (2) look at whether key historical sources further specific aesthetics of music and, if so, how they do this (which aesthetics do the sources support?); (3) look at what the most plausible aesthetic model or models for music might be; (4) discuss how aesthetics in general (not confined to music) were influenced by music aesthetics ( thoughts on music ); (5) suggest how instances of music embody contemporary aesthetics of music without the suggestion that music, as a human product, is mimetic of society. High Level Design (B) The objectives of this book are to (1) exploit diverse philosophical literature (not necessarily alluding to music) in order to gain new perspectives on music aesthetics; (2) trace the genesis and survival of autonomistic music aesthetics; (3) qualitatively evaluate autonomistic music aesthetics in relation to aesthetic alternatives; (4) reappraise the aesthetic function of music at the turn of the eighteenth century; (5) theorize in new ways about how the content of music may be comprised of its own internal structure. Low Level Design Each chapter is structured in two connected parts, the second part building on principles and topics encountered in the first part. The central argument throughout the book, the embeddedness of aesthetic theory within music, is properly staged in the final chapter. The chapters are of equal length (12,000 words), giving a structured conceptual progression. 1
Chapter One Sources of music s selfhood: paradigms and principles This chapter begins with an important tension underlying how we evaluate paradigms in music aesthetics. Do we offer what may be regarded as a historical treatment of the paradigm according to a history of ideas? Such an approach contains the possibility that texts expounding music aesthetics may be best understood by considering them in their own right or in the context of the views of contemporary authors (including their views of the past). However, it is also clear that in order to appreciate how music aesthetics evolve and function a philosophical account would be useful. This approach entails an outline of more general questions critically raised by considering texts on music aesthetics individually and in simple chronological sequence. The philosophical interest in music generalizes from music's historical aesthetic vicissitudes (the different models for music proposed by historical aesthetics) to the desire to contribute towards a deeper understanding of the truth of its nature, at least at a theoretical level. In a philosophical account, which may or may not be applied to a specific historical period, there need not be a chronological restriction of sources. This means that modern sources may assist the discussion of historical events and that, in the concern to further a philosophical perspective that is independent of the sequential history of ideas, a chronological order of events is not necessarily imposed. Adapting to texts on music aesthetics, this chapter critically evaluates Carl Dahlhaus s explanation of tradition critique : Tradition critique has always been a major part of the science of history. Historians do not begin their work from nothing, examining primary sources with no presuppositions or preconceptions, but are occupied in disproving, modifying, or corroborating previous historical accounts of events and circumstances from the past. Incorporated into a method, this distrust of surviving records gives rise to questions without which primary sources would remain mute and meaningless. It is previous histories that provide the motivation for writing history; facts do no more than supply the material to follow up this initial impetus (Foundations of Music History, tr. J. B. Robinson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], p. 105). Without necessarily taking it for granted that historians do approach their task from the perspective of critiquing received historical interpretations, the first part of the chapter analyzes what it means to extrapolate the immediate meaning of texts on music aesthetics and what it means to construct a history of music aesthetics. Having considered the ideological basis of the treatment of sources - the balance between considering texts purely in their own right as historical objects and considering them as organic components within a discursive framework that is not limited by chronological ordering and evaluated ways in which sources are approached and assessed in current musicological discourse, the second part of this chapter proposes a formulation of principles and practice specific to the exegesis of texts concerning music aesthetics: how does the reader discern in a particular text the operation of an aesthetic paradigm? how can we read sensitively and in what ways should we consider context? (These questions receive deeper treatment in the next chapter, which asks how in the first place we comprehend the philosophic orientation of texts treating of music aesthetics, in other words the presence within them of a particular aesthetic model for music, for example the mimetic model or the autonomistic model, that conceptually reveals their attitudes towards the nature of music.) 2
Chapter Two Discerning hermeneutics: music and strands of thought Continuing the focus on the reading of texts, this chapter singles out the process(es) by which we conceptualize the aesthetic content of key historical sources on the nature of music. In what ways can we know the philosophical meaning and direction of texts that propose to our understanding qualitative statements on the function and purpose of music? In other words, how can we notice the individuality of the aesthetics that each text proposes? Are a priori mechanisms available to us, or do we base our hermeneutics on a contingent experiencing of the texts that holds out the promise (real or illusory) of ideal explanation? It would appear, for example, that the aesthetic thought of many individual eighteenth-century British and French writers (for example, Batteux, Reynolds and Twining) is unified in the explanation and promotion of the same doctrines of imitation and expression in music, but the personal imprint of each writer on these questions is, more importantly, unique, and the challenge of developing an historical approach that recognizes this and its role in constructing a common conceptual framework for eighteenth-century music aesthetics still requires to be fully met. Therefore this chapter contextualizes and reexamines the generalizations we habitually make about the philosophy of music in the eighteenth century as a prime example of the modern historical phase by emphasizing the nuanced detail offered by contemporary sources dealing with what appear to be the same or similar aesthetic questions. A second concern of this chapter is the range of critical methods by which sources across all aesthetic allegiances articulate their manifestoes (once identified). These methods are constituted by vocabularies and ideological constructs that, in individual sources, read music according to a ratio of external norms, such as environmental contexts or the projection of reality in or onto the music, to internal norms, such as the immanent artistic content of music ( the notes themselves ), structurally revealing the philosophic orientation of the text. Where philosophical ambiguity is perceived, the organizational shape of fine-grained ways of reading texts exhibiting uncertainty in their argumentative commitment is analyzed. From considering these hermeneutic dimensions, the chapter assesses some writers claims to finality in their appraisal of music s meaning and the perceptual modes through which it achieves its effects (for example, the case of Hanslick), as well as the alternative notion that music aesthetics are recursive because of the continual nature of textual play at work in the corpus of aesthetic thought. The first part of this chapter considers how our habitual procedures for reading music aesthetics engage a kind of close listening to the text not unlike the way in which we grasp the consistency of a musical work. Postulating analogies and rapports between textual apprehension of aesthetic readings and ordinary (or developed) listening to music provides one area of focus for the central thesis of the book (that is fully staged in the final chapter). From this, the second part considers the extent to which texts treating of music aesthetics may have rhetorical content that can inform our understanding of their literary and philosophic messages, in a way similar to how music itself may have its own rhetoric, and evaluates whether such content occurs by virtue of the historical context proper to the creation of the text, or by being a kind of ahistorical, internal structural property of it. 3
Chapter Three Axiologies of music aesthetics and the case of autonomy This chapter moves from a focus on reading texts to a focus on their philosophical content, especially how we can and do value the different paradigms that texts on music aesthetics put before us, but, together with the preceding chapter, it also prepares for a broader notion of philosophical text, to include musical works themselves. Musical works, as argued in the key final chapter, do not consist simply of general philosophical thoughts, as suggested by Friedrich Schlegel and comprehensively discussed by musicologists such as Mark Evan Bonds and Daniel Chua and by philosophers such as Andrew Bowie, but of philosophical thoughts specific to aesthetics contemporary to the actual creation of the musical work in question that are embedded in the elemental structure of the music (its harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, textural, timbral, registral and formal gestures). In thinking that theory inheres in the figures of music in this way, we are daring to explore analytically and figuratively how music speaks to us about itself, tells us the secrets of its creative milieu, insinuates concept, plays with the abstract. In doing so we construct a new narratology of music by intuiting holistically what kind of product music is how, according to its context and technical functions, it absorbs historical detail. Applying Harold Osborne s useful fundamental schema of general aesthetic theory, which is organized according to the human interests served by art (such as processes of manufacture, reflection and organic integration), to music, the present chapter, further contextualizing this kind of thinking on the aesthetic content of music, evaluates the stages comprising Osborne s schema both in isolation and within the frame of an autonomistic model of music that concentrates on its intrinsic internal content. Thus the conceptual and historical progress of music aesthetics towards a model of autonomous music is schematized in a basic way according to categories of art. A further concern of this chapter is to explain and critique the formalist assumption that music is irreducibly constituted by its content and assess the extent to which such an assumption depends on the autonomistic model of music. Exploring in what senses it is legitimate to argue for the plausibility of one aesthetic model of music over others, the ensuing discussion furthers the case for music s autonomy and interrogates why it has floundered or even imploded. The chapter begins by critically outlining two essays by John Casey and Goran Hermerén on the autonomy of art, in order to formulate the conceptual framework to which the axiological focus on general aesthetic theories of music is to be attached. The discussion in this part of the chapter continues by progressively evaluating a sequence of theories of music that parallel the pragmatic, mimetic and purely aesthetic theoretical categories outlined in Osborne s schema. Building on the framework from the first part, the second part of the chapter outlines why the positive progression towards the aesthetic autonomy of music, that was a tangible preoccupation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discourse on music, has been transcended and derailed by the increasing multiplicity of the content, function and meaning of art, phenomenon and spirit, and whether the revaluing of music s content, as it is swept along by new currents, can be directed back towards autonomy or redefined in autonomistic terms. 4
Chapter Four In dem Spiegel der Töne : Romantic music and the aesthetic moment Building on the principles of interpreting aesthetic texts discussed in earlier chapters, this chapter, using the end of the eighteenth century as its particular locus, argues that Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder s mirror the interface of ineffable music with the world becomes a token of how aesthetic theory in general may be presupposed by thoughts on music. This betokening encapsulates how the complex of concepts and philosophies that constitutes what is labelled Romanticism provides a moment in which normative aesthetics are, at their origin, infused with the philosophy of music. Utilizing and extending principles for the definition of key sources, formulated earlier, the hermeneutical import, in relation to music aesthetics, of a cross-section of the literary and philosophical discourse network underlying critical Romanticism, is proposed as an example of how the practice of music aesthetics becomes a paradigm for thinking about sensory perception and the arts. This involves the dual complementary activities of reading literary and philosophical texts of the period through the lens of the absolutist aesthetics that occur from our own and contemporary writers debates on the nature of purely instrumental music (in particular) for example, Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul Richter, Novalis, and Michaelis and of informing our own and contemporary aesthetic viewpoints on music with a much broader range of textual and artistic sources than is typically listed in current interdisciplinary discourse on historical music aesthetics. The focus on absolute instrumental music provides a specific case of and introduction to the general theory and central argument of the book, that specific works of music in some way inherently contain the historical as well as the conceptual aesthetic presuppositions that attended their creation. Also, the nature of this moment for normative aesthetics that is generated by Romantic thinking itself participates in and is circumscribed by the duality of historical exegesis, on the one hand, and philosophical exegesis, on the other (as outlined in earlier chapters), and this application of history and philosophy is a consequence and interpretation of the broad kind of reading of texts in this period, here advocated, that takes on a special character. The chapter begins with a critique of intense musical Romanticism. A discussion of radical German writers on music, beginning with Wackenroder, is contextualized into strands of contemporary English poetry and the philosophy of the imagination developed through Coleridge, in a dialectic that asserts how music compenetrated aesthetics and the arts. The second part of the chapter, building on the discussion in the second part of the previous chapter of the reception of autonomistic aesthetics, evaluates the modern and postmodern reception of musical Romanticism, with particular reference to the work of Richard Eldridge, in order to show the extent to which the project, as it appeared in Romanticism, of instigating music as a paradigm for aesthetic theorizing in general retains its viability and relevance, and to justify an important place for music in aesthetic theory. 5
Chapter Five Instantiating aesthetics: music, embodiment and history The principle of autonomous music having been contextualized and theoretically evaluated in the previous chapters, the final chapter and summit of the book s argument focuses primarily on telling anew the story of the appearance of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century as a narrative of music s incorporation of contemporary philosophical meaning in ways specific to its elemental and gestural content. This thesis runs counter to the contrasting, currently accepted notion, proposed by Bellamy Hosler and others, that aesthetic theory had to adapt and update itself in order to cope with the artistic progressivity of the new absolute instrumental music. Bringing together the concepts of text and autonomy outlined in earlier chapters, instead of conceiving of aesthetic theory as merely functioning to explain the artistic creativity to which it is contemporary, it is argued that the changes in philosophical outlook constituting aesthetic theory are actually inscribed in the continuous repertoire of musical works themselves, thus radically reconceptualizing the bodily history of music. This has the fundamental consequence that, contrary to the premises of critical theory, actual musical repertoire is itself implicated and involved in the description of the very aesthetic principles that underlie it, and is therefore not simply and ontologically an artefact of personal and social existence. The question whether music may be thought of in conceptual terms as an autonomous entity, with no extraneous knowledge from artefacts or human expression, or, alternatively, as a socially mediated form whose phenomenology is illustrative of the bodily humanity of its creation, is therefore reformulated heuristically by assuming a new mode of musical content, which is the aesthetic idea that is part of the history of an individual musical work. The critical argument of this chapter and this book, therefore, does not shy away from the radically subjective theory that the degree of aesthetic autonomy inherent in any musical work (a concept for which we need to open a new level of vocabulary) is a function of its internal rhetorical and technical styles. This moves from common tasks of discerning and examining music s internal rhetoric in order to adduce the creative intentions of the makers of musical works (for example, tropes in Robert Schumann s piano music) to the more radical extension of adducing historically conceived patterns of aesthetic intention in musical works through the formulation of bespoke, historically-informed philosophical discourse. The first part of the chapter focuses on the characteristic case of music s autonomy in the eighteenth century. Interrogating individual musical works from varied genres and forces with historically and philosophically based ways of reading them as texts, their ties to contemporary aesthetic theory are analyzed, with the resulting interpretations unified in order to propose a new critical framework for the historical exegesis of texts and music. The second part of the chapter concentrates on extending the exegetical principles of the first part to repertories beyond the eighteenth century, asking how and why we find other aesthetic principles in musics other than those conceived on an autonomistic basis. The book concludes by stating that, if according to autonomist theorists all music is, by virtue of its essence, autonomous, the discernment of historically contingent elements of which philosophical meaning is one within music distinguishes a new way of connecting history and philosophy and of appraising the meaning of music. 6
Key features: freshly surveys music aesthetics from the standpoint of aesthetic autonomy evaluates ways of reading and proposes new ideas for interacting with texts on aesthetics challenges dominant thinking on music aesthetics proposes radical new theory linking musical works to their historical contexts re-examines the interconnections between historical and philosophical approaches Readership: Musicologists Philosophers Historians of ideas Literature scholars Postgraduates and advanced undergraduates across humanities disciplines 7