Absolute music

Absolute music (sometimes abstract music) is music that is not explicitly 'about' anything; in contrast to program music, it is non-representational. The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early German Romanticism, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by Richard Wagner in a programme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.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.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. 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.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. Absolute music (sometimes abstract music) is music that is not explicitly 'about' anything; in contrast to program music, it is non-representational. The idea of absolute music developed at the end of the 18th century in the writings of authors of early German Romanticism, such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann but the term was not coined until 1846 where it was first used by Richard Wagner in a programme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. 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 treating as a deficit 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 attributed to the invisibility of sound. The ensuing arguments among musicians, composers, music historians and critics have, in effect, never stopped. 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. 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. 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'. 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 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.