The Idea of Absolute Music

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by michelinewalker in Absolute music, Age of Enlightenment, programme music, the ineffable

Tags

Absolute music, Beethoven's Fifth, Carl Dalhaus, E.T.A. Hoffman, Hanslick, infinity within, programme music, Richard Wagner, Romantic Metaphysics, the ineffable

Renaissance Hurdy-Gurdy

This article was posted in 2011, but the distinction between absolute and programmatic music is worth revisiting. The 2011 post contained the word “ineffable” and reads as follows:

I am in the process of writing a review of Carl Dalhaus’s (1928-1989) Idea of Absolute Music,[1] a difficult task that requires more reflection on my part.

However, the idea came to me that I should first blog about the subject.

My first step will be to quote E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Review of Beethoven‘s Fifth Symphony.[2] Hoffmann was so moved by the beauty of the Fifth Symphony that he called it “an intimation of infinity.” One is therefore tempted to associate this statement, first, with the idea of absolute music and, second, with the Romantic metaphysics of the Sublime.

ABSOLUTE versus PROGRAMMATIC MUSIC

As “an intimation of infinity,” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can indeed be linked with the Romantic metaphysics of the Sublime. Moreover, the Fifth Symphony is also “absolute music.” However, although Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is, in my opinion, “an intimation of infinity,” and sublime, because of its choral movement, it is not “absolute music,” a term coined by Richard Wagner (Dalhaus, p. 18).

Absolute music is self-referential instrumental music. Therefore, it excludes Beethoven’s setting of Friedrich Schiller’s (1759-1805) “Ode to Joy” (“An die Freude”) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is deemed referential and, consequently, programmatic music, as are the Third Symphony, the “Eroika,” and the Sixth Symphony, “The Pastoral.” Also excluded are Mendelssohn’s iconic Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words). The forty-nine short pieces for the piano have titles and pieces of music that have a title are not absolute music. They belong to another category of music called “programme music” or programmatic music, a forerunner to music for films.

The most colourful event in the debate on absolute music is the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, in 1830. The composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was distributing the Symphonie‘s programme to members of the audience. The story told by the Fantastique is literally and figuratively “fantastic,” but the programme does not make the music more or less beautiful. Later, in the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote a programme for Beethoven’s already programmatic Ninth Symphony.

So where do I go from now?

I believe that I should first dissociate absolute music from music that is considered sublime or simply beautiful. The term absolute music is a Procrustean bed. Moreover, I should point out, once again, that absolute music is not necessarily more beautiful or less beautiful than programme music. Second, it seems to me that I should address the question of meaning. If Liszt thought that Hector Berlioz’s instrumental Symphonie fantastique could not be understood without its “programme,” he was obviously expressing doubts as to the intelligibility of the language of tones, unexplained and “unrestrained” by a narrative.

The Greeks: ethos

I am using the word “unrestrained” because from the time the Greeks, Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) mainly, invented polyphonic music, music was deemed too powerful an art not to be contained. According to Plato’s (424/423 BCE – 348/347 BCE) theory of ethos, such power should be restrained.

Text-setting, Affektenlehrer, Empfindsamkeit

It was. In European music, words came to the rescue of tones. Musicians had to set a text to music. Excellent text-setting is exemplified by Josquin des Prez (c. 1450-1521). Madrigals (songs in the mother tongue: madre) also required careful text-setting. So did the motet. Besides, it was decided at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) that, in polyphonic (music combining many voices) religious music, words would have to be heard clearly. Palestrina’s music is the culmination of transparent polyphonic music.

There were other attempts to contain music. One was the doctrine of the affections (Affektenlehrer) put forward in such works as Johann Mattheson’s (1681–1764) Der vollkommene Capellmeister (The Perfect Chapelmaster), 1739. Theorists suggested ways of arousing certain feelings, ethically-acceptable feelings.

I should also mention the empfindsamer Stil[3] (sentimental style) or Empfindsamkeit an “important movement occurring in northern German instrumental music during the mid-18th century and characterized by an emphasis upon the expression of a variety of deeply felt emotions within a musical work.”

DALHAUS: absolute music

I could therefore walk my reader through various opinions on the subject of absolute music, but without profound analysis. A review is a review. However, for the purposes of this post, I think it may be useful to return to the Greeks and note, as did Plato, that music is an extremely powerful art, except that it does not need to be restrained. It could be that the idea of “absolute music” was yet another attempt, probably a mostly unconscious attempt, to contain purely instrumental music. Could one accept unbridled “intimation[s] of infinity?”

Dalhaus does not discuss programmatic music. His book is about the “idea of absolute music.”

In the nineteenth century, music had been emancipated from words, but I believe that doubt still lingered concerning the acceptability of music without words, hence the lengthy debate about the idea of absolute music, the debate Dalhaus chronicles so accurately and in a most eloquent manner. The finest minds of Germany, including Nietzsche, had something to offer to this debate. But the most influential work was Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music), published in 1854. Hanslick addressed the je-ne-sais-quoi that can make music so beautiful and, by extension, so powerful.

MEANING IN MUSIC: a language above language

Yet, I believe music can be “an intimation of infinity,” although less loftily said. At any rate, the debate over absolute music has very real merits. For instance, such a debate emphasizes the undeniable and frequently-expressed fact that music is a “language above language,” a language that tells the otherwise ineffable and might therefore be more meaningful than other languages, national languages.

But rare are those who can compose transcendental music and rare are those who can perceive it as such. In his Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (p. 238), E. T. A. Hoffmann writes that “[r]omantic sensibility is rare, and romantic talent even rarer, which is probably why so few are able to strike the lyre that unlocks the wonderful realm of the infinite.”

The debate also emphasizes that music is not a laissez-faire. Music has its grammar: harmony, counterpoint, themes, Berlioz’s idée fixe, phrases, periods, etc. And music also has its forms: the sonata, the concerto, the symphony, the quartet, cantatas, oratorios, operas, hymns, not to mention the humble song, sometimes so haunting and evocative, etc.

As for the distinction between self-referential music, called “absolute music,” and “programme music,” it may be best to look upon it as yet another step in the history of music. The emancipation of music from words was like a mini-revolution; a debate was unavoidable.

Words do not make music more or less beautiful than instrumental music. And if words do at times make it more meaningful, music can be meaningful in its own way and, at times, more meaningful than national languages, with or without words. Music speaks its very own language. Truth be told, the human voice is also an instrument, and one of the finest. What about the Ninth Symphony’s Choral movement, Bach‘s Mass in B minor, his many cantatas, Mozart’s Requiem, Henry Purcell ‘s Dido and Æneas? Each time I hear Dido’s Lament: the “Remember me,” I have to stop and listen.

The “ineffable”

There is more to say, names to name and persons to quote, such as Hanslick, Wackenroder, Tieck, Feuerbach, Wittgenstein, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, but it could be stated that Carl Dalhaus’s Idea of Absolute Music is about that undefinable dimension of music, that undefinable dimension so often called ineffable, an ineffable that stems and touches an infinity-within (the term is mine).

In short, meaning in music does not call for a programme, except for operas. When words are used, words the audience does not understand, the language of tones might require the support of a translation or that of a programme. Yet, the language of tones has/is its own meaning.

The word ineffable has long been attached to exquisite music, and it would be my opinion that the conversation will continue and may, in fact, never end.

[1] Carl Dalhaus, Roger Lustig, translator, The Idea of Absolute Music (London: the University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[2] David Charlton, ed. and Martin Clarke, translator, E. T. A. Hoffman’s Musical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 238.

[3] “empfindsamer Stil.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.
https://www.britannica.com/art/empfindsamer-Stil

Henry Purcell (c. 10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695)

Dido’s Lament (Dido and Æneas)

Simone Kermes soprano
The New Siberian Singers

Greek vase with muse playing the phorminx, a type of lyre

14 October 2011

WordPress

Fables and Parables: the Ineffable

12 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by michelinewalker in Fables, Jean de La Fontaine, Symbols

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Brotherly love, Enemy Brothers, Homing Pigeons, La Fontaine's Two Pigeons, Pigeons & Doves, Précieuses, Sacred & Secular, Salons, the ineffable, The Parable of the Prodigal Son

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Pompeo Batoni, (1773) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fables & Parables

When Jean de La Fontaine (8 July 1621 – 13 April 1695) published his first collection of fables, he drew his subject matter from Greek fabulist Æsop (c. 620 – 564 BCE). Interestingly, Æsop lived before Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BCE – c. CE/AD 30 / 33) and the prophet Mohammad (c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE). Yet, in the Préface to La Fontaine’s first collection of poems, 6 books, published in 1668, La Fontaine compared his fables to the parables of Jesus of Nazareth: “Truth has spoken to men in parables; and is the parable anything else than a fable? ”

And what I say is not altogether without foundation, since, if I may venture to speak of that which is most sacred in our eyes in the same breath with the errors of the ancients, we find that Truth has spoken to men in parables; and is the parable anything else than a fable? that is to say, a feigned example of some truth, which has by so much the more force and effect as it is the more common and familiar?

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50316/50316-h/50316-h.htm

Ce que je dis n’est pas tout à fait sans fondement puisque, s’il m’est permis de mêler ce que nous avons de plus sacré parmi les erreurs du paganisme, nous voyons que la Vérité a parlé aux hommes par paraboles; et la parabole est-elle autre chose que l’apologue, c’est-à-dire un exemple fabuleux, et qui s’insinue avec d’autant plus de facilité et d’effet qu’il est plus commun et plus familier?

The Parable of the Prodigal Son does resemble a fable. Its narrative is “the more common and familiar.” However, despite a “more common and familiar,” exemplum, it tells the otherwise ineffable. How does one speak of love unconditional and forgiveness, which is at the core of Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings? In The Parable of the Prodigal Son, one of two brothers asks to be given his half of his father’s estate. This son then leaves home, squanders his money foolishly, and is reduced to starvation when a famine occurs. He therefore returns to his father’s home, saying that he has sinned.

When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’

(Luke 15:11-32 NIV [New International Version])

A lay, or secular, reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son does point to foolish and, therefore, relatively “common” human behaviour on the part of the prodigal son. From the very beginning of La Fontaine’s fable about the two pigeons, the pigeon who has fallen prey to wanderlust is called fool enough, “assez fou.”

Two doves once cherished for each other
The love that brother has for brother.
But one, of scenes domestic tiring,
To see the foreign world aspiring,
Was fool enough to undertake
A journey long, over land and lake.
The Two Doves

Deux Pigeons s’aimaient d’amour tendre.
L’un d’eux s’ennuyant au logis
Fut assez fou pour entreprendre
Un voyage en lointain pays.
Les Deux Pigeons

However, La Fontaine’s pigeon was merely tired of “scenes domestic,” which is not a sin. He suffers the consequences he was told he would suffer, except that the dreaded falcons are an eagle and that children are “pitiless” human beings who try to harm our traveler.

My heart forebodes the saddest lot
The falcons [faucons], nets Alas, it rains!
The Two Doves

Je ne songerai plus que rencontre funeste,
Que Faucons, que réseaux [nets]. Hélas, dirai-je, il pleut : …
Les Deux Pigeons

To a large extent, the moral of The Two Pigeons is embedded in the story or exemplum. Yet, early in his fable, La Fontaine inserts a proverb, a genre that does not require a narrative or exemplum. Proverbs are related to fables and parables, but they are short, as are maxims. La Rochefoucauld wrote maxims.

L’absence est le plus grand des maux :
Non pas pour vous, cruel. …
Les Deux Pigeons

This absence is the worst of ills;
Your heart may bear, but me it kills.
The Two Doves

Absence was a topic discussed in the French Salons of the first half of the 17^th century, by Précieuses and Précieux. Précieuses discussed “questions of love,” chaste love mostly. Although La Fontaine’s poem is not a disquisition on absence, he inserts a proverb in the early verses of Les Deux Pigeons: “L’absence est le plus cruel des maux [pl. of mal].” This proverb, the word “absence” in particular, introduces romantic love, which constitutes a discourse between human beings, mainly, and doves. Jean de La Fontaine’s fable is not altogether about two pigeons. Anthromorphism characterizes only one part of the fable, its beginning. (See Romance, Wikipedia.)

La Fontaine’s motto (devise) was:

Diversité c’est ma devise.
Pâté d’anguille, Contes de La Fontaine

and his fable features modulations and transpositions, as in music. He writes “variations” on the theme of love. The segment I quoted in my last post expresses romantic love.

Ah, happy lovers, would you roam?
Pray, let it not be far from home.
To each the other ought to be
A world of beauty ever new;
In each the other ought to see
The whole of what is good and true.
The Two Doves

Amants, heureux amants, voulez-vous voyager ?
Que ce soit aux rives prochaines ;
Soyez-vous l’un à l’autre un monde toujours beau,
Toujours divers, toujours nouveau ;
Tenez-vous lieu de tout, comptez pour rien le reste [.]
Les Deux Pigeons

Moreover, although both our pigeons and the prodigal son have been fools, the prodigal son has sinned: “I have sinned against heaven and against you” (Luke 15:11-32), which suggests a gradation among exempla (pl.). When both pigeons are reunited, they rejoice, pigeons are pigeons, but the prodigal son confesses: “I have sinned” (Luke 15:11-32).

The Parable of the Prodigal Son features two sons, one of whom, the “good” brother, is rather miffed because his father celebrates his prodigal brother’s (the “bad” brother) return. The parable has three figures, one of whom, the father, is a wise and Christic figure, and tells the ineffable.

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’

(Luke 15:11-32 NIV [New International Version])

Given that one son is miffed, La Fontaine may have been inspired by the Biblical enemy brothers or Cain and Abel, sons born to Adam and Eve, one of whom, Cain, kills his brother, Abel. (See Cain and Abel, Sophocles’ Antigone, Jean Racine’s La Thébaïde, and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, Wikipedia.) Were it not for a wise father, the prodigal son’s brother, or “good” son, may have harboured resentment. But La Fontaine’s fable’s dramatis personae consists of two, not three, figures: Les Deux Pigeons.

Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Cain_slaying_Abel,_1608-1609

Cain slaying Abel by Peter Paul Rubens, 1608 (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

The Exemplum: Sermons

Fables and parables also describes sermons. The word exemplum is usually associated with the sermons of the Middle Ages. Jacques de Vitry (Jacobus de Vitriaco c. 1160/70 – 1 May 1240), a French canon regular who rose to prominence, wrote hundreds of exempla (pl.). In the English language, John Donne (22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) is the author of very fine sermons. But few preachers have empowered their words to the same extent as French bishop and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet.

The unexpected and suspicious death, perhaps poisoning, at the age of 26, of ‘Madame,’ Henriette d’Angleterre, 26 June 1644 – 30 June 1670, the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, called ‘Monsieur,’ was an exemplum few circumstances could equal. [1] In 17^th-century France, the age of Louis XIV, an absolute monarch, the memento mori (remember that you have to die), nearly supplanted the carped diem (seize the day) of Horatian Odes I.XI. [2] How does one keep an absolute monarch humble? One approach is to remind him of his mortality, but indirectly. Louis XIV attended Madame‘s funeral and heard Bossuet’s Oraison funèbre. Bossuet also wrote the funeral oration of Louis III, Prince de Condé, 10 November 1668 – 4 March 1710, a “prince of the blood” (un prince du sang). [3] There is a king greater than Louis XIV. Coincidentally, or ineffably, Jean de La Fontaine ends Les Deux Pigeons suggesting that he may be too old to love:

Ai-je passé le temps d’aimer ?
Les Deux Pigeons

Is love, to me, with things that were?
The Two Doves

The Rose

You may remember the vanitas, still lifes, created by artists who often used flowers to express the brevity of life. The Roman de la Rose is our best example. But who can forget François de Malherbe‘s [4] exquisite Consolation à M. Du Périer:

Et rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,
L’espace d’un matin.
Consolation à M. Du Périer (1598) [5]
(See Consolatio.com, transl.)

Roses in a Glass Vase by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1873
(Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, England) (Photo credit: Venetian Red)

Contrary to Horace’s precept, to inform and to delight, or blending l’utile et l’agréable, sermons may not provide delight or pleasure, which Horace (Ars Poetica) teaches. It remains that wrapped in a story, a message is easier to convey, and to remember, than non-fiction. Gustave Doré has ‘illustrated’ the anthropomorphic nature of The Two Pigeons, (Gutenberg [EBook #50516]).

The Two Doves by Gustave Doré, Gutenberg [EBook #50316]

La Fontaine: http://www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net/meunfils.htm FR
La Fontaine: http://www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net/nine1_2_3.htm EN

The Personal and the Pastoral

After “le reste” or “good and true,” La Fontaine speaks about himself and recalls a bergère, a shepherdess. Pastorals are a discourse on love. Salonniers and salonnières also compared themselves to shepherds and shepherdesses. The most famous bucolic or pastoral novel of 17^th-century France is Honoré d’Urfé‘s L’Astrée, written in the first quarter of the 17^thcentury and modelled on Guarini‘s Il Pastor Fido (1590). Having loved, La Fontaine writes:

J‘ai quelquefois aimé ! je n’aurais pas alors
Contre le Louvre et ses trésors,
Contre le firmament et sa voûte céleste,
Changé les bois, changé les lieux
Honorés par les pas, éclairés par les yeux
De l’aimable et jeune Bergère (shepherdess)
Pour qui, sous le fils de Cythère, (Kythira)
Je servis, engagé par mes premiers serments.
Les Deux Pigeons

Myself have loved; nor would I then,
For all the wealth of crowned men,
Or arch celestial, paved with gold,
The presence of those woods has sold,
And fields, and banks, and hillocks, which
Were by the joyful steps made rich,
And smiled beneath the charming eyes
Of her who made my heart a prize
To whom I pledged it, nothing loath,
And sealed the pledge with virgin oath.
The Two Doves

Pigeons, Doves and Turtledoves

Dove, and the symbology of love
Homing pigeons

The translator of La Fontaine’s Site officiel uses the word “dove,” not pigeon. Doves are colombes and tourtelles, turtledoves. In the symbology of love, one uses the word colombe. Doves, colombes and pigeons are columbidae, but they differ from one another. Therefore, the translator of the Musée de France introduces love, romantic love, by using the word colombe, in the title of his translation. As for Walter Thornbury [EBook #50316], he translated the French pigeons using the English pigeons. It is the same word in both languages. But it should be noted that we do not have homing doves, just homing pigeons. By using pigeons, Jean de La Fontaine suggests that his columbidae will return home. He describes the pigeon as a volatile (a bird, noun) FR and volatile (adjective) FR/EN.

Conclusion

There is a sense in which literature (non-fiction), speaking animals in particular, always tell, to a smaller or greater extent, that which cannot be told. Anthropomorphism and zoomorphism are effective recourses, but the exemplum, and various displacements (modulations or transpositions) may also be used. In the context of our two pigeons, “L’absence est le pire des maux” seems too elevated a moral. But La Fontaine raises the curtain only to let it fall again.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/12/18/the-fabulous-la-fontaine/

Very few of his poems are specifically lyrical in character, and those few are not among his most typical. It is clear, however, that the power of La Fontaine’s lyricism depends on its displacement into the most surprising contexts.[6]

Charles Gounod has set to music verses from Les Deux Pigeons, and so have I (shame on me). Charles Aznavour has composed a song based on La Fontaine’s Deux Pigeons.

RELATED ARTICLES

French, Malherbe (geudensherman.WordPress) FR
Consolatio.com (01 February 2005)
To Inform or Delight (29 March 2013)
Courtly Love or Fin’Amor (7 March 2013)
Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism (6 March 2017)

Love to everyone ♥
____________________

[1] Oraison funèbre d’Henriette-Anne d’Angleterre is a Wikisource publication FR
The Funeral Oration of Henrietta of England is a Wikisource publication EN (Gordon Goodwin, transl.)
[2] Gather Ye Roses by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1875, is a Wikisource publication
[3] On the Death of the Great Condé is a Wikisource publication (Robert Turnbull, transl.) EN
Oraison funèbre du très haut et très puissant prince Louis de Condé is a Wikisource publication FR
[4] French, Malherbe (geudensherman.WordPress) EN ♥
[5] Consolatio.com (01 February 2005) EN ♥
[6] Charles Rosen, “The Fabulous La Fontaine,” The New York Review of Books, 18 December 1997. ♥

Charles Aznavour sings Les Deux Pigeons

Bruno Laplante sings Les Deux Pigeons by Charles Gounod

Picasso’s Dove of peace, 1949

The Idea of Absolute Music

14 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in Absolute music, programme music, the ineffable

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Absolute music, Beethoven's Fifth, Carl Dalhaus, E.T.A. Hoffman, Hanslick, infinity within, programme music, Richard Wagner, Romantic Metaphysics, the ineffable

Renaissance Hurdy-Gurdy

I am in the process of writing a review of Carl Dalhaus’ (1928-1989) Idea of Absolute Music[1], a difficult task that requires more reflection on my part.

However, the idea came to me that I should first blog about the subject.

My first step will be to quote E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.[2] Hoffmann was so moved by the beauty of the Fifth Symphony that he called it “an intimation of infinity.” One is therefore tempted to associate this statement, first, with the idea of absolute music and, second, with the Romantic metaphysics of the Sublime.

ABSOLUTE versus PROGRAMMATIC MUSIC

The most colourful event in the debate about absolute music is the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, in 1830. Composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) distributed the Symphonie’s programme to members of the audience. The story told by the Fantastique is literally and figuratively “fantastic,” but the programme does not make the music more or less beautiful. Later in the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote a programme for Beethoven’s already programmatic Ninth Symphony.

So, where do I go from now?

The Greeks: ethos

I am using the word “unrestrained” because from the time the Greeks, Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BCE) mainly, invented polyphonic music, music was deemed too powerful an art not to be contained. According to Plato’s (424/423 BCE – 348/347 BCE) theory of ethos, such power should be restrained.

Text-setting, Affektenlehrer, Empfindsamkeit

It was. In European music, words came to the rescue of tones. Musicians had to set a text to music. Excellent text-setting is exemplified by Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521). Madrigals (songs in the mother tongue: madre) also required careful text-setting. So did the motet. Besides, it was decided at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) that, in polyphonic religious music (music combining many voices), words would have to be heard clearly. Palestrina’s music is the culmination of transparent polyphonic music.

DALHAUS: absolute music

I could therefore walk my reader through various opinions on the subject of absolute music, but without profound analysis. A review is a review. However, for the purposes of this blog, I think it may be useful to return to the Greeks and note, as did Plato, that music is an extremely powerful art, except that it does not need to be restrained. It could be that the idea of “absolute music” was yet another attempt, probably a mostly unconscious attempt, to contain purely instrumental music. Could one accept unbridled “intimation[s] of infinity?”

Dalhaus does not discuss programmatic music. His book is about the “idea of absolute music.”

MEANING IN MUSIC: a language above language

Words do not make music more or less beautiful than instrumental music. And if words do at times make it more meaningful, music can be meaningful in its own way and, at times, more meaningful than national languages, with or without words. Music speaks its very own language. Truth be told, the human voice is also an instrument, and one of the finest. What about the Ninth Symphony’s Choral movement, Bach’s Mass in B minor, his many cantatas, all of Mozart, Henry Purcell‘s Dido and Æneas? Each time I hear Dido’s Lament: the “Remember me,” I have to stop and listen.

The “ineffable”

The word ineffable has long been attached to exquisite music, and it would be my opinion that the conversation will continue and may, in fact, never end.

[1] Carl Dalhaus, Roger Lustig, translator, The Idea of Absolute Music (London: the University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[2] David Charlton, ed. and Martin Clarke, translator, E. T. A. Hoffman’s Musical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 238.

[3] “empfindsamer Stil.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.

Henry Purcell (c. 10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695)

Dido’s Lament (Dido and Æneas)

Simone Kermes soprano
The New Siberian Singers

Greek vase with muse playing the phorminx, a type of lyre

14 October 2011

WordPress