Absolute Music

The last few decades of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century have seen renewed and often highly skeptical interest in the claims of music's absoluteness alongside an increasingly entrenched advocacy, the latter reinforced by the growth of musical analysis as a discipline. Carl Dahlhaus has historicized the concept, grounding it in Germanic philosophical and musical thought. Many have argued persuasively that the idea is fundamentally a fiction, that music is always referential to a variety of contexts, some historical and others acquired through reception. Most of these arguments have focused either on a consideration of musical narrative (i.e., the way that music may be understood to tell stories (Anthony Newcomb, Lawrence Kramer, and Susan McClary) or on musical semiotics, of how music has continued to develop an evolving system of referential gestures redolent of the older "doctrine of the affections" (Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Leonard Ratner, and Wye Allanbrook). If "absolute music" has indeed been a fiction, it has been a useful one from many perspectives, helping to enable the experience of music as a uniquely powerful art medium. Under the aegis of its absoluteness, which renders its shapes and gestures officially neutral, music has been capable of reinforcing—but with full deniability—a full array of values and ideas, and of projecting, within its "meaningless" interplay of definiteness and vagueness, phantasmal versions of a re-imagined reality.