Absolute Music

Instrumental music has no purpose or content outside of itself.

A German philosophical idea of the nineteenth century, "absolute" music refers to instrumental music that is "untainted" by words and extra-musical ideas;
it is a pure art form. One of the first advocates for this concept was writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822), as expressed in his review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in 1810. Richard Wagner (1813-83) later challenged this idea, arguing that poetry, dance, and music created a complete artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Defenders of absolute music, including German music critic Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904), pointed to the instrumental music of Johannes Brahms (1833-97) as the ideal. Hansilk argued that there is no strict causation between a particular musical phrase and its emotional effect, and that the same musical phrase set to diametrically different poetry could be considered equally appropriate.

"Music cannot imitate nature: amusical storm always sounds like the wrath of Zeus."
----W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and other Essays (1962)

Music has no purpose beyond itself. Hansilk never denied that a piece of music could engender extra-musical thoughts and feelings, but maintained that these emotions were not intrinsically linked to the music itself, only the individual listener.

The notion of absolute music represents a valid aesthetic problem: if music's content is just "tonally moving forms", as Hansilk termed it, why are there often agreements between different listeners as to the expressive properties of a composition? With the advent of silent cinema, music written to fit standardised dramatic situations --- love scene, chase, agonised reflection --- created a more or less fixed vocabulary of musical gestures. Perhaps there is a purpose for music after all: to provide support for moving images.

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Source:
"1001 Ideas That Changed the Way We Think"
-- by Robert Arp.
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