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This chapter begins by stating the ‘problem’ of absolute music: what it is in or about absolute music that gives what appears, at least, to be the same kind of deep satisfaction that the other arts, the arts with content, give. The problem thus being stated, the unenlightened one would then be ready to hear that a proposed solution to the problem of absolute music, popular both in philosophical and music-theoretical circles, is to deny that absolute music does indeed want for literary content. But here the unenlightened one becomes puzzled. So how can the appeal of absolute music be explained by appeal to its narrative content? If it has narrative content, then it isn't absolute music? The simplicity of this disguises an insight worth pursuing, which the chapter does.

This chapter starts by acknowledging that much of the discussion of music in the previous chapters has focused on music that has a strong and obvious link to materials outside music (texts, dramatic or narrative context, ideological allegiances), and considers whether and how the ecological approach can shed light on the so-called absolute and autonomous music of the Western canon. After a brief discussion of the concepts of autonomy and heteronomy, the chapter moves to a discussion of autonomy and ecology, and from there to a discussion of different listening styles. A number of different characterizations of listening are presented, including two typologies — by Theodor Adorno and Pierre Schaeffer. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the specific character of autonomous music and the particular kind of consciousness that it can afford.

Chapter 3 showed how musical formalism came into full flower in Hanslick's ‘little book’ along with the denial that absolute music could, or, therefore was meant to, arouse or ‘represent’ so-called ‘garden-variety emotions’. It was also shown how this denial of the emotive connection drew an immediate reply from Ambros, to the effect that the loss of emotion could be made up for by the substitution of ‘mood’. This move on Ambros's part presaged a similar move in contemporary philosophy. This chapter explores that move in one of its contemporary manifestations.

This chapter explores the possibility of the kinds of narrative interpretation put on absolute music by Robinson, Maus, and Newcomb being offered as attempts to provide an explanation for the interest and pleasure that we take in absolute music. It argues that if they are so offered, they fail in their purpose. But one thing those failed answers to the failure of formalism have right, if indeed they were so intended: formalism's defenders have failed to give an adequate explanation for the deep interest and pleasure that absolute music, in the Western canon, provides to its devotees — interest and pleasure to such a degree that it emboldens them to put the masterpieces of the canon alongside those masterpieces of the great poets, novelists, painters, and sculptors, from antiquity to the present.

Identifying certain forms of music as Jewish and establishing the criteria for how Jewishness in music would be recognized preoccupied ideological and aesthetic concerns of many Jews entering modernity by the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter concerns itself primarily with the ways in which Jewishness would counterbalance the nineteenth-century notion of absolute music, in which textual meaning negated contextual functions. Richard Wagner’s invective 1850 essay on “Jewishness in Music” unleashed responses until the Holocaust, and the chapter summarizes many of these, especially by leading Jewish music critics. Examples are drawn from Mahler, Jewish social organizations, and political musical traditions of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Tucholsky, and others from the Weimar period separating the world wars.

This chapter argues that the feeling of ecstasy, exaltation, or passionate enthusiasm that absolute music in its highest manifestations calls forth in its devotees, is of an intrinsic worth beyond price, and during the time one is experiencing it one is, on that account, a better person. It may not be an enduring moral force in the world, or a revelation of a deeper reality, but it is great while it lasts. And if it makes us better in the moment, by affecting us in the way that it does, then this is more than can be said for most human experience, and more than enough to justify the esteem in which it is held.

This chapter argues that the logically proper way to see the spate of recent attempts to put narrative interpretations on the works of absolute music, accepted as such in the canon, is to see them as attempts to demonstrate that these works are not works of absolute music at all but, in reality, programmatic works mistakenly taken to be works of absolute music. To do otherwise — in particular, to describe these interpretations as imparting narrative content to absolute music, as defined — is a logical howler. It is further argued that the bar for successful narrative interpretation of the absolute music canon — which is to say, the successful demonstration that an alleged work of absolute music is in reality program music a clef — must be raised.

This chapter examines the moral claims of absolute music. It argues that absolute music shares with many other human activities the propensity to produce, in human beings, a kind of ecstasy that might seem appropriate to describe as character-enhancing, consciousness-raising and, therefore, in some vague, perhaps attenuated sense, morally improving, while it lasts. However, being just one of many such activities, absolute music seems to lose that special, magical connection to morality that goes back, one suspects, to its Pythagorean and Orphic roots.

Literary interpreters of the absolute music canon tend to fall into two distinct groups. Those who throw caution to the winds and impute to pure instrumental music narratives in startling detail, even to the extent of naming names; and those of a more circumspect disposition, who put narrations to the music that are vague or sketchy enough to slip by without striking the average music lover as wildly implausible or ‘off the wall’. The most popular and most frequently resorted to artifice, for those narrative interpreters of the more moderate stripe, to underwrite their readings of the absolute music canon, is a shadowy figure that has become known as the musical ‘persona’. This character is the subject of this chapter.

This chapter begins with a discussion of what might be called the ‘attitude of rapt attention’ to works of absolute music. It then explores the mystery of absolute music. It considers the views of Malcolm Budd, who argued that there is no mystery, at least no philosophical mystery, here at all.

In the 18th century, when music was under discussion it was vocal music that was almost always was talked about by philosophers and other ‘theorists’ of the arts. There wasn't any real problem with vocal music's membership in the family of the fine arts since it had a poetic text, and there was never any doubt that poetry was a fine art: indeed it was the paradigm case. Also, what the fine arts were supposed to have in common, as their defining principle, was representation. And vocal music, since the end of the 16th century, had been understood as a representational art: it represented the passionate tones of the human speaking voice. The bone of contention was pure instrumental music: music without a text, what came to be called ‘absolute music’ in the 19th century. The problem was that it was difficult to see how, if representation was to be the defining property of the fine arts, that principle could apply to absolute music. For it seemed to have no plausible object of representation: the human voice seemed an unlikely candidate, although it was proposed from time to time; and there was no other in evidence to serve the purpose, if the human voice could not. In the context of the debate over whether or not absolute music is one of the fine arts, this chapter examines Kant's philosophy of music as a whole, and his musical formalism in particular.

This chapter resumes discussion begun in the first chapter, focusing on the changed outlooks of Brahms and his Viennese colleagues in the 1890s. Prominent citizens who had earlier objected to signs of Czech nationalism now recognized consequences of German nationalism. Hanslick, who had grown up in Prague, exemplified contradictions of Liberalism in his simultaneous admiration for and unwitting condescension toward Dvořák. Discussion of reception of Dvořák's music by Hanslick and Theodor Helm highlights differences between the older and newer German nationalism. Brahms's library and an overlooked archival collection afford insights into his views. An orthodox Liberal, he rejected the cultural despair of German tribalism but voiced discouragement about the future of music. Liberal economics were being unmasked as second nature, as would absolute tonal music slightly later. Yet Brahms's late music is beautiful because it responds to demands of music-historical lateness while conveying the peculiar expressiveness of a late style.

This introductory chapter discusses recordings and other media in American musicology. It reveals that there is no vernacular practice for the so-called classical music, and introduces the concept of vernacular art-musical practice. The chapter provides an account of absolute music during the second half of the twentieth century, showing how it has changed as an aesthetic paradigm, and then explains the role of technology in music and discusses media. It also provides several details on the topics discussed in the book.

Romanticism arose along with other values that are the foundations of modern life, like human rights, democracy, the decimal system, the universal use of family names, marriage based on love, and street addresses. No wonder it is so pervasive. Musicians find themselves looking at rhetorical repertoire through a series of veils, consisting of axioms and dogmas, usually unspoken, that are so strong in their culture that they tend to distort and obscure everything that pre- Romantic people thought music was meant to do, or how they went about playing it: not just how to play a trill, but something as basic as how to read the page. This chapter discusses classical music and why the Romantics called music “classical”, canonism in music, Charles Burney's documentation of the beginnings of music history, what conservatories conserve absolute music (the autonomy principle), originality in music and music genius, attribution and designer labels, and repeatability and ritualized performance.

This chapter studies the different media forms of music, such as the long-playing record, the CD, and the MP3 file, determining the relevance of encoding the music of classical composers such as Berg, Brahms, Birtwhistle, and Beethoven as numerical data. It looks at the arrival of digital audio and discusses literacy, which is described as human connection with an information system. The chapter furthermore studies the concepts of absolute music, the metatechnologies of musical-aesthetic information, musical canons, and playlists.

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.