Absolute music

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This article is about Absolute music, the musical term. For the series of compilation albums, see Absolute (record compilation).

Absolute music, less often abstract music, is a term used to describe music that is not explicitly "about" anything, non-representational or non-objective. Absolute music has no words and no references to stories or images or any other kind of extramusical idea. It is also known in classical contexts as abstract music and is in contrast to program music. The view of absolute music as music "for its own sake" derives from Kant's aesthetic disinterestedness from his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Ashby 2004, p.7).

Carl Dahlhaus describes absolute music as music without a "concept, object, and purpose."

[edit] Debate and Criticism

In the 19th century, music critics such as Eduard Hanslick wrote that absolute music was a more aesthetically pure (and thus, more desirable) form of art than music containing a program. Programmatic works such as opera, song, and tone poems were deprecated by such critics, who preferred more absolute forms such as symphonies (though many famous symphonies, such as Beethoven's 'Pastoral Symphony', do have explicit programs).

  • "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

Many contemporary musicologists, most notably Susan McClary, have 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. This reflects the view that classical music is rarely about "nothing", but reflects aesthetic tastes that are themselves influenced by culture, politics and philosophy. Most composers of absolute music were bound up in a web of tradition and influence, in which they strove to consciously situate themselves in relation to other composers and styles.

McClary has suggested that even musical form can have meaning. For example, in her controversial 1991 book Feminine Endings, she argues that sonata form (in which one theme "triumphs" over another) has a veiled political content that reflects the European gender politics of the 17th and 18th centuries.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Ashby, Arved, ed. (2004). "Introduction", The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1-58046-143-3.
  • Dahlhaus, Carl, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, Roger. ISBN 0-226-13487-3
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