![]() One still finds instances of music being harnessed to other ends. The serious music lover, one who loves the art for its own sake, will regard these instances as a misuse or perversion of music. One thinks of “Soviet realist” music in communist Russia, or the Nazis’ appropriation of Wagner. To be sure, music has been used for ends outside of itself, including ideological ones. The idea was that music was not (or should not be) dependent on anything extrinsic to it, did not exist for the sake of anything else, and was its own end. “Music for its own sake” (like “art for art’s sake”) was a popular concept with musical aestheticians such as the critic Eduard Hanslick, one of Brahms’ admirers. The idea that music is “pure” or “absolute” was stressed in the nineteenth century. As a result, music is perhaps less filled with commentary and verbal clutter than other areas of intellectual life, and that is all to the better. They find easier fodder in visual art and literature because those arts deal more or less with concrete things in the world. Music’s “vagueness” and subjectivity are its very strength, allowing the listener to interpret or react to it as he wishes.īeing mysterious and hard to pin down, music is typically left alone by writers who deal in the “world of ideas”-general or intellectual history, sociopolitical matters, and the like. Music, at heart, deals in indefinable moods and states of the soul. There may be clues in the expressive or rhetorical shape of the music-everyone can tell that the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth is a drama, for instance-but these are no more than general emotional or psychological states that may be suggested by the notes. But when it comes to instrumental music, and particularly instrumental music that has no “program” or descriptive intent, one can rarely if ever assign to it an exact meaning. True, when music is married to a text, the music is assumed to express and enhance the meaning of the text (how, exactly, it does this might again be hard to specify). Music is thought to be abstract, dealing in patterns of sound that have a meaning independent of the meanings of verbal language. Music is often claimed to be-and valued as-a “pure” art, one detached from the referents to the external world that we find in painting or literature. It frees us from captivity to the world of things and from history, ideology, and politics, and raises us to an experience of pure emotional and spiritual states. Music’s purity and detachment from other fields of activity means that it is has a purifying effect on the soul.
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