ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with an array of discourses on the concept of ‘development’ in music and focuses on the twentieth-century reception of Max Weber’s study on music in both musicology and music sociology. First I will discuss Weber’s narrative on music about Western society as a totality characterized by a tendency towards extreme rationalization. As a consequence, Weber saw Western music as more rationalized than any other music. Rationality was also an evaluative concept for him. Later in this chapter I will analyse how Weber saw the ‘rationalized’ music as the most ‘developed’, the most ‘complex’ and the ‘best’ music that the whole of civilization had ever achieved. He was convinced that his analysis could prove that the ‘peak’ of the rationalization process was to be found in the ‘great’ masterpieces of German composers, starting with Johann Sebastian Bach and finishing with Richard Wagner.