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"Absolute music."
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Antithetical Arts
This book constitutes a defence of musical formalism against those who would put literary interpretations on the absolute music canon. In Part I, the historical origins of both the literary interpretation of absolute music and musical formalism are laid out. In Part II, specific attempts to put literary interpretations on various works of the absolute music canon are examined and criticized. Finally, in Part III, the question is raised as to what the human significance of absolute music is, if it does not lie in its representational or narrative content. The answer is that, as yet, philosophy has no answer, and that the question should be considered an important one for philosophers of art to consider, and to try to answer without appeal to representational or narrative content.
eBook
Musical Form as a Framing Device: Absolute Music and Desiderius a Dó The Second Desiderius by Pádraig Ó Cíobháin
This paper undertakes a close reading of European classical music forms used as a framing device in the Irish language novel Desiderius a Dó (1995) by Pádraig Ó Cíobháin. Considered one of the seminal novels of modern Irish, Ó Cíobháin’s work contains what the scholar Irina Rajewsky describes as “intramedial references to visual arts, music, cinema, literature and architecture”. Classical music occupies a central place in the novel, and is essential for an understanding of its plot, characterization, narrative and its thematic concern with ideas of binaries and performance. The paper examines absolute music forms characteristic of the classical period in the novel, explores how Ó Cíobháin uses liturgical music and chant, and concludes that the overall effect of the writer’s approach is a reimagination of the Irish language novel within a European frame that is remarkable for the depth and scope it gives the characters and the narrative. Avtorica v prispevku razišče vlogo klasičnih evropskih glasbenih oblik kot pripovednega okvira v irskem romanu Desiderius a Dó (1995) avtorja Pádraiga Ó Cíobháina. Roman velja za enega najpomembnejših romanov v sodobni irščini in po mnenju Irine Rajewsky vključuje »intramedialne reference na vizualne umetnosti, glasbo, kinematografijo, književnost in arhitekturo«. Klasična glasba zavzema osrednje mesto v romanu in je ključna za razumevanje zapleta, karakterizacije ter same pripovedi in njenega tematskega osredotočanja na binarizme ter glasbo kot uprizoritev. Pričujoče besedilo preučuje klasične oblike absolutne glasbe v omenjenem romanu, opredeli načine, kako Ó Cíobháin uporablja liturgično glasbo in napeve, ter v zaključku ugotavlja, da je splošni učinek avtorjevega pristopa ponovna umestitev irskega romana znotraj evropskega okvira na način, ki izstopa zaradi globine in širine, ki jo daje likom in pripovedi.
Journal Article
To “Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind”
This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The great philosopher and economist Adam Smith is known to have had a conception of instrumental music exceptional for his time in its foreshadowing of ideas generally associated with Eduard Hanslick. As I show here, Smith’s views were decisively influenced by the psychological theories of his countryman Thomas Reid in all likelihood by way of the extraordinary proto-cognitivist music theory of their contemporary John Holden, in particular the latter’s conceptualization of the faculty of attention. The innovative contributions of these writers constitute a compact and suggestive case study in the circulation of ideas about perception and listening between philosophy and music, and suggest that the Scottish Enlightenment attitude to psychology enabled a new kind of theorizing about the musical experience: one that foregrounded the importance of the faculty of attention in the process of perceiving music and sound.
Journal Article
Rethinking Topic Theory
This essay gives a critical history of Anglophone topic theory as it evolved between the publication of Leonard Ratner’s Classic Music (\". fn_cite_year( $ratner_1980).\") and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (\". fn_cite($ mirka_2014).\"). Throughout this period, topic theory transformed from the identification of “characteristic figures” in eighteenth-century music into an analytical strategy for the intersubjective verification of correspondences between musical signifiers and extramusical meaning. Though Melanie Lowe (\". fn_cite($lowe_2007).\") upheld the intertextuality of topics as a way past music’s “flawed” opposition with the extramusical, the binary has exerted sustained influence even as topic theory has advanced beyond the eighteenth-century canon to encompass more repertoires and interpretive methodologies. And because the musical-extramusical opposition finds its roots in the nineteenth-century idea of absolute music, it turns out that aspects of present-day topic theory are symptomatic of a much older way of thinking that evidently still gatekeeps what counts as knowledge about music. Historicizing topic theory provides interfaces for reconsidering the mutually constitutive relationships among music, meaning, analysis, interpretation, power, and politics.
Journal Article
Metaphysical Song
In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes.
Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, Metaphysical Song details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner.
eBook
Why Does Pure Music Not Have Semantic Content?
The aim of this paper is to analyze the possibility of semantic content in pure music. The paper argues that pure music does not have semantic content. This conclusion relies on the Gricean analysis of meaning in terms of speakers’ intentions and on Peter Kivy’s argument that pure music does not meet the Gricean requirement for the composers’ intention. First, we analyze the results of empirical studies of metaphorical conceptualization of music; they show that the connections between properties of sound and various metaphors are not “one-to-one” but “one-to-many”. These results support a further argument that it is not possible for a composer to have an intention to communicate by his work of music what is, as we know from the empirical studies, perceived in music by the listeners; and if he has an intention to communicate something more specific than what is perceived by the listeners, the communication is bound to fail. This failure shows the absence of a Gricean communicative intention in the composer, even if an informative intention would be present.
Journal Article
RIPENSARE L’UMANESIMO MUSICALE
Why should a journal on Renaissance culture dedicate a section to music? And what is the very definition of music in the context of intellectual history during the Renaissance period? These questions are an invitation to interrogate the historical motivation of today’s separation of musicology from the other fields of the humanities. Mirroring that invitation, this essay proposes to think about the role of musical knowledge in the construction of European culture. The Renaissance period is a fertile ground for a reflection of this sort: it was precisely during the 15th and 16th centuries that European culture saw an extraordinary convergence of mind and work of art and science that established the basis of the modern musical time.
Journal Article