The 19th century music critic Eduard Hanslick argued that music could be enjoyed as pure sound and form, and that it needed no connotation of extra-musical elements to warrant its existence. In this respect, music has no extra-musical meaning at all and is enjoyed by appreciation of its formal structure and technical construction. Formalist debate įormalism is the concept of music for music's sake, or that music's 'meaning' is entirely in its form. According to Richter, music would eventually 'outlast' the word. These thinkers believed that music could be more emotionally powerful and stimulating without words. In this respect, instrumental music transcends other arts and languages to become the discourse of a 'higher realm', an idea expressed in Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, published in 1813. Hoffmann gave rise to the idea of what can be labeled as "spiritual absolutism". The ensuing arguments among musicians, composers, music historians and critics continue today.Ī group of Romantics consisting of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Jean Paul Richter and E.T.A. 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. Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, dismissed music as "more a matter of enjoyment than culture" and "less worth in the judgement of reason than any other of the fine arts" because of its lack of conceptual content, thus treating as a deficit the very feature of music that others celebrated. The aesthetic ideas underlying absolute music derive from debates over the relative value of what was known in the early years of aesthetic theory as the fine arts. 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 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. JSTOR ( April 2009) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ībsolute music (sometimes abstract music) is music that is not explicitly "about" anything in contrast to program music, it is non- representational.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.
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