The term ‘absolute music’ denotes not so much an agreed idea as an aesthetic problem. The expression is of German origin, first appearing in the writings of Romantic philosophers and critics such as J.L. Tieck, J.G. Herder, W.H. Wackenroder, Jean Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann. It features in the controversies of the 19th century – for example, in Hanslick’s spirited defence of absolute Tonkunst against the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner – and also in the abstractions of 20th-century musical aesthetics. It names an ideal of musical purity, an ideal from which music has been held to depart in a variety of ways; for example, by being subordinated to words (as in song), to drama (as in opera), to some representational meaning (as in programme music), or even to the vague requirements of emotional expression. Indeed, it has been more usual to give a negative than a positive definition of the absolute in music. The best way to speak of a thing that claims to be ‘absolute’ is to say what it is not.
It is not word-setting. Songs, liturgical music and opera are all denied the status of absolute music. For in word-setting music is thought to depart from the ideal of purity by lending itself to independent methods of expression. The music has to be understood at least partly in terms of its contribution to the verbal sense. It follows that absolute music must at least be instrumental music (and the human voice may sometimes act as an instrument, as in certain works of Debussy, Delius and Holst). Liszt and Wagner insisted that the absence of words from music did not entail the absence of meaning. Liszt’s Programm-Musik and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk both arose from the view that all music was essentially meaningful and no music could be considered more absolute than any other. This view gives rise to a further negative definition of the ‘absolute’ in music: it is music that has no external reference. So the imitation of nature in music is a departure from an absolute ideal: Vivaldi’s concertos the ‘Four Seasons’ are less absolute than the Art of Fugue. The symphonic poem is also tainted with impurity, as is every other form of Programme music.
The yearning for the absolute is not yet satisfied. Having removed representation from the ideal of music, critics have sought to remove expression as well. No music can be absolute if it seeks to be understood in terms of an extra-musical meaning, whether the meaning lies in a reference to external objects or in expression of the human mind. Absolute music is now made wholly autonomous. Its raison d’être lies entirely within itself; it must be understood as an abstract structure bearing only accidental relations to the movement of the human soul. Liszt and Wagner claimed that there could be no absolute music in that sense; it is possible that even Hanslick might have agreed with them.
It is at this point that the concept of absolute music becomes unclear. Certainly it no longer corresponds to what Richter and Hoffmann had in mind. Both writers considered the purity of music – its quality as an ‘absolute’ art – to reside in the nature of its expressive powers and not in their total absence. For Richter music was absolute in that it expressed a presentiment of the divine in nature; for Hoffmann it became absolute through the attempt to express the infinite in the only form that renders the infinite intelligible to human feeling. To borrow the terminology of Hegel: music is absolute because it expresses the Absolute. (On that view, liturgical music is the most absolute of all.)
The notion of the ‘absolute’ in music has thus become inseparably entangled with the problem of musical expression. Is all music expressive, only some or none at all? The answer to that question will determine the usage of the term ‘absolute’ in criticism. To define the term negatively leads at once to an intractable philosophical problem. A positive definition has therefore been sought.
An analogy may be drawn with mathematics. Pure mathematics can be defined negatively: it is mathematics which is not applied. But that is shallow; for what is applied mathematics if not the application of an independent and autonomous structure of thought? One should therefore define pure mathematics in terms of the methods and structures by which it is understood. Similarly, it might be argued that music is absolute when it is not applied, or when it is not subjected to any purpose independent of its own autonomous movement. Absolute music must be understood as pure form, according to canons that are internal to itself. Unfortunately, such a positive definition of the term raises another philosophical problem: what is meant by ‘understanding music’? And can there be a form of art which is understood in terms that are wholly internal to itself?
Attempts by the advocates of absolute music to answer those questions have centred on two ideas: objectivity and structure. Their arguments have been presented in this century most forcefully by the Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker and by Stravinsky. Music becomes absolute by being an ‘objective’ art, and it acquires objectivity through its structure. To say of music that it is objective is to say that it is understood as an object in itself, without recourse to any semantic meaning, external purpose or subjective idea. It becomes objective through producing appropriate patterns and forms. These forms satisfy us because we have an understanding of the structural relations which they exemplify. The relations are grasped by the ear in an intuitive act of apprehension, but the satisfaction that springs therefrom is akin to the satisfaction derived from the pursuit of mathematics. It is not a satisfaction that is open to everyone. Like mathematics it depends on understanding, and understanding can be induced only by the establishment of a proper musical culture. For Schenker, this means learning to hear a piece of music ‘structurally’, as an elaboration of an underlying harmonic and melodic structure, ‘composed out’ into a musical foreground. But this technical explanation of musical form need not be accepted in order to believe that music should be understood as pure form, without reference to any content.
It is such a conception of the absolute in music that has figured most largely in modern discussions. It is in the minds of those who deny that music can be absolute, as of those who insist that it must be. It has inspired the reaction against Romanticism, and sought exemplification in the works of Hindemith, Stravinsky and the followers of Schoenberg. Indeed, the invention of 12-note composition seemed to many to reveal that music was essentially a structural art, and that all the traditional effects of music could be renewed just so long as the new ‘language’ imitated the complexity of the classical forms. (Schoenberg did not share the enthusiasm of his disciples for such a theory; for him music had been, and remained, an essentially expressive medium.)
It should be noted that ‘absolute’ music, so defined, means more than ‘abstract’ music. There are other abstract arts, including architecture and some forms of painting. To call them abstract is to say that they are not representational. It is not to imply that they are to be understood by reference to no external purpose and no subjective state of mind. An abstract painting does not have to lack expression. Yet ‘absolute’ music is an ideal that will not allow even that measure of impurity.
As an ideal it certainly existed before the jargon of its name. Boethius and Tinctoris gave early expression to it, and even Zarlino was under its influence. Paradoxically, however, the rise of instrumental music and the development of Classical forms saw the temporary disappearance of the absolute ideal. Only after Herder and his followers had introduced the word, and Wagner (through his opposition to it) the concept, did the ideal once more find expression in serious aesthetic theories.
The advocacy of absolute music has brought with it a view of musical understanding that is as questionable as anything written by Liszt in defence of the symphonic poem. It is of course absurd to suppose that one understands Smetana’s Vltava primarily by understanding what it ‘means’. For that seems to imply that the grasp of melody, development, harmony and musical relations are all subordinate to a message that could have been expressed as well in words. But so too is it absurd to suppose that one has understood a Bach fugue when one has a grasp of all the structural relations that exist among its parts. The understanding listener is not a computer. The logic of Bach’s fugues must be heard: it is understood in experience and not in thought. And why should not the musical experience embrace feeling and evocation just as much as pure structured sound? Hearing the chorus ‘Sind Blitze sind Donner’ from the St Matthew Passion may provide a renewed sense of the significance of the Art of Fugue, and that sense may originate in a recognition of the emotional energy that underlies all Bach’s fugal writing. Clearly, however ‘absolute’ a piece of music may be, it can retain our interest only if there is something more to understanding it than an appreciation of patterns of sound.
MGG1 (W. Wiora)
MGG2 (W. Seidel)
E. Hanslick: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Leipzig, 1854/R, 16/1966; ed. and Eng. trans., 1986, by G. Payzant)
H. Riemann: Die Elemente der musikalischen Ästhetik (Berlin, 1900)
F. Busoni: Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Trieste, 1907, 2/1916/R; Eng. trans., 1911); Eng. trans. repr. in Three Classics in the Aesthetics of Music (New York, 1962)
M. Griveau: ‘Le sens et l’expression de la musique pure’, IMusSCR IV: London 1911, 238–50
A. Schoenberg: Harmonielehre (Vienna, 1911, 3/1922; Eng. trans., abridged, 1948, complete, 1978)
H. Schenker: Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (Munich, 1925–30/R)
A. Wellek: ‘Gefühl und Kunst’, Neue psychologische Studien, xiv (1939), 1–24
I. Stravinsky: Poétique musicale sous forme de six leçons (Cambridge, MA, 1942; Eng. trans., 1947)
N. Cazden: ‘Realism in Abstract Music’, ML, xxxvi (1955), 17–38
A. Sychra: ‘Die Einheit von “absoluter” Musik und Programmusik’, BMw, i/3 (1959), 2–7
H.J. Moser: ‘Der Geltungsbereich der absoluten Musik’, Musica, xiii (1959), 697–701
P.H. Lang: ‘Objectivity and Constructionism in Vocal Music of the 15th and 16th Centuries’, Natalicia musicologica Knud Jeppesen … oblata, ed. B. Hjelmborg and S. Sørensen (Copenhagen, 1962), 115–24
W. Wiora: ‘Zwischen absoluter und Programmusik’, Festschrift Friedrich Blume, ed. A.A. Abert and W. Pfannkuch (Kassel, 1963), 381–8
C. Dahlhaus: Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel and Munich, 1978, 2/1987)
V. Kalisch: ‘Wagner, Nietzsche und die Idee der “absoluten Musik”’, Festschrift Hans Conradin, ed. V. Kalisch (Berne and Stuttgart, 1983), 151–61
C. Dahlhaus: Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber, 1988)
W. Seidel: ‘Zwischen Immanuel Kant und der musikalischen Klassik: die Ästhetik des musikalischen Kunstwerks um 1800’, Das musikalische Kunstwerk: … Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus, ed. H. Danuser and others (Laaber, 1988), 67–84
L. Treitler: ‘Mozart and the Idea of Absolute Music’, ibid., 413–40
P. Kivy: Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990)
ROGER SCRUTON