ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the story of contemporary situation of art and music in society. The Religion was displaced by Reason during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, music and art in general gradually assumed the burden of the Sacred in secular culture. This process flowered at the end of the 18th century in a Romanticism which poured the Sacred, or sublime, into Nature, reaffirming a secular kind of mystical or ecstatic experience as against or alongside Reason. The composer's engagement with the work in progress makes it the world of the composer, that grand arena in which very complex and subtle structures contend from moment to moment. Composing music is a way of living one's life. That very intimate apartness from the work while creating the work, the dissent that makes it art, is itself the engagement of the work with the world. The music is an object available to others in all its Sichselbstgleichheit, because apartness is built into it.