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Basic aspects of Schenker's later thought can be traced to the 1890s, when Schenker was active in composition, performance, and music criticism. This chapter situates these activities in the contemporary Viennese context, emphasizing the relationship between Schenker and Eduard Hanslick. It outlines aspects of the idealist philosophy which coloured his thinking and criticizes recent approaches to the philosophical dimension of Schenker's thought. It traces the changes in Schenker's thinking about music — and in particular the concept of musical “logic” — that underpinned the development of his later theory. Much of the discussion is focussed round his early essay “The spirit of musical technique’ (1895), a new translation of which (by William Pastille) is included as an appendix.

Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) addresses all of the qualities—expression, beauty, form, autonomy, disclosiveness—that had for so long played a central role in discussions about the relationship between music’s essence and effect. Its title places autonomy (Musikalisch-) and beauty (-Schönen) at the center of his conception of music. The primary “contribution to the revision of musical aesthetics” promised in the subtitle is the separation of music’s effect from an account of music’s essence. Music’s sole content, according to the treatise’s most famous and often-quoted phrase, consists of tönend bewegte Formen, forms set in motion through musical tones. The treatise is by turns conventional, radical, and ambivalent. The original ending, deleted incrementally over the next two editions, is especially revealing of Hanslick’s conflicted thinking about the relationship of music’s essence and effect.

Eduard Hanslick's ‘little book’ (as he called it), Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, has become, in recent years, a text celebre among those philosophers who began, not too long ago, to interest themselves in the special problems that music might present to their subject. Standing alone as the inaugural work in the history of musical formalism as a philosophical position, Hanslick's little book has received close scrutiny in recent years by a number of aestheticians. But viewed it the light of Wilhelm August Ambros's ‘answer’ another ‘little book’, entitled Der Grenzen der Musik und Poesie: Eine Studie zur Aesthetik der Tonkunst, provides a better idea of its philosophical significance. In light of Ambros's critique of Hanslick, this chapter explores what Hanslick had to say.

Chapter 2, “Formalism’s Flower,” elaborates on the theme of form as it appears in two key contributions to the aesthetics of natural beauty and musical beauty: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful. In keeping with the current interest among environmental philosophers in remedying the nearly exclusive focus of post-Kantian aesthetics on the human arts, the chapter examines how Kant’s and Hanslick’s reflections on beauty highlight the formal and experiential ground shared by music and nature, ground that neither thinker explored in detail. The chapter develops conceptual strategies in which aspects of form and beauty serve to illustrate processual and dynamic features of both music and nature, strategies that guide the ensuing discussion of arabeske and its musical analogues. As a decorative art in which the mimesis of vegetal forms and energies is crossbred with human geometrical precision, arabeske points the way toward a naturalistic music criticism that nonetheless remains focused on the peculiarities of its chosen art, as the chapter shows in an analysis of Robert Schumann’s Arabeske, op. 18 (1839) for solo piano.

This chapter examines the conditions of Jewish composers during the age of liberalism, Johannes Brahms, and music critic Eduard Hanslick, discussing Brahms's association with the Liberal Party and highlighting the fact that he was accused of philo-Semitism in the German nationalist press. It also considers the work of Jewish pianist Ferdinand Hiller and how the musical triumvirate of Karl Goldmark, Hanslick, and Brahms evolved an amalgam of values in which both the purity of art and the purity of German musical traditions merged.

Armed with new nouns that aligned philosophical concepts with specific repertories, critics debated the superiority of absolute and program music in a spirit of intense partisanship throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. As in ideological disputes of all kinds, each party tended to misrepresent the other’s views. Self-styled progressives routinely described the “forms” of absolute music as “rigid,” “rule-bound,” and “outmoded,” while self-styled traditionalists dismissed program music as inherently “formless” and “unmusical.” Such differences reflected more than simply a contrast of aesthetic outlooks, for the debate about music was part of a larger culture war in a period of enormous social, political, and technological change. One side perceived the arts as an instrument of reform, while the other perceived them as a refuge of stability from those same forces of change.

Chapter 5, “Music Between Reaction and Response,” evaluates music’s capacity to thwart conceptions of the human based on the sovereign power of rationality. Music’s ability to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies has long been recognized, as two Greek myths attest: Orpheus made music that inspired human-like attention in animals, trees, and stones, while the Sirens reduced passing sailors to the level of animals incapable of resisting their song. Recast in terms employed by Jacques Lacan and criticized by Jacques Derrida, these myths portray music as calling forth a response in creatures thought merely able to react and, contrariwise, stripping away the capacity for response in humans, leaving nothing but reaction in its place. The chapter revisits eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentaries by the philosophers and critics Johann Georg Sulzer, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Eduard Hanslick in order to illuminate persistent anxieties over the admixture of reaction and response in musical listening. Addressing more recent studies in music perception and ethology, the chapter weaves research on the physiological reactions involved in musical responsiveness into a philosophical perspective on the expressiveness of sound that accommodates the communicative arts of both humans and animals.

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the polemics between advocates of absolute and program music began to lose steam. The two sides continued to clash, but without the fervor that had characterized the debate in earlier decades. A new generation of composers and critics was inclined to accept the legitimacy of absolute and program music alike. Those who began their careers after 1880 tended to adopt a less polarizing attitude to explain the relationship between music’s essence and its effect. At the end of the century, relatively few subscribed to the idea that one repertory belonged to the past and the other to the future. The rhetoric of exclusion gradually gave way to one of tolerance.

This chapter inquires into the cause for the conspicuous absence of erotic portrayal through music based on the theory propounded by Eduard Hanslick in his work On The Musically Beautiful (1854). It seeks to assert the intrinsic value of music as opposed to the Aristotlean theory of imitation of nature by art. Hanslick asserts that rather than slavishly imitate nature, music should transform it. He envisages a balance in the instrumental nature of music rather than absolutely negating or rejecting it. By declaring that music does not consider “the beautiful in nature,” Hanslick renders music as superior to other arts relevant to the Age of Progress. To this end, Beethoven's abstract musical is deemed superior to his An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved), due to the absence of specificity in the former, which enhances the scope of yearning at the center of Romanticism.

At the time Ives began the Concord, program music (music that implicitly referred to or musical described historical or literary narratives) was still somewhat controversial. The prologue of Essays Before a Sonata takes up the topic of program music and reveals Ives’s erudite understanding of its previous history. It also reveals his indebtedness to a minor English Hegelian philosopher named Henry Sturt, who has never before been covered in the Ives literature.

Beethoven’s style, composers and critics agreed, could not be imitated. But his subjectivity—or, more precisely, his perceived attitude of subjectivity—could be emulated quite readily, and it became the new norm soon after his death. Critics, moreover, heard compositional subjectivity not only in new music but also in selected works of the pre-Beethovenian past. In the meantime, the increasingly public nature of musical life created a growing demand for journals, miniature scores, and composer biographies that could help listeners comprehend an instrumental repertoire that was becoming stylistically ever more diverse and technically difficult. Composer biographies, a rarity before 1800, had become commonplace by mid-century. Concert-hall audiences now assumed that the instrumental music they were hearing came from deep within the soul of the composer.