"Programming the Absolute" discusses the notorious opposition
between absolute and program music as a true dialectic that lies at
the heart of nineteenth-century German music. Beginning with
Beethoven, Berthold Hoeckner traces the aesthetic problem of
musical meaning in works by Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, and
Schoenberg, whose private messages and public predicaments are
emblematic for the cultural legacy of this rich repertory.
After Romanticism had elevated music as a language "beyond"
language, the ineffable spurred an unprecedented proliferation of
musical analysis and criticism. Taking his cue from Adorno,
Hoeckner develops the idea of a "hermeneutics of a moment," which
holds that musical meaning crystallizes only momentarily--in a
particular passage, a progression, even a single note. And such
moments can signify as little as a fleeting personal memory or as
much as the whole of German music.
Although absolute music emerged with a matrix of values--the
integrity of the subject, the aesthetic autonomy of art, and the
intrinsic worth of high culture--that are highly contested in
musicology today, Hoeckner argues that we should not completely
discard the ideal of a music that continues to offer moments of
transcendence and liberation.
Passionately and artfully written, Hoeckner's quest for an
"essayistic musicology" displays an original intelligence willing
to take interpretive risks. It is a provocative contribution to our
knowledge about some of Europe's most important music--and to
contemporary controversies over how music should be understood and
experienced.
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