ABSTRACT
Any attempt to read the texts of literary music from a musically-informed perspective is prone to the nagging sense that such texts are simply too far removed from the music itself, a distance measured in the sheer number of unmusical words which they comprise. The gap is felt to be at its widest when the music in question is instrumental or orchestral, what Peter Kivy has termed ‘music alone’, not only because of the absence of a verbal bridge linking the two texts, but also for the reason that music alone, from the late eighteenth century onwards – that is, from the time of its dominance as the primary form of art music in Europe – has been tied umbilically to the workings of a very particular aesthetic. Indeed, aesthetics might be said in significant part to have developed out of, and subsequently to have taken its coordinates from, the distinctly modern phenomenon of untexted music intended for silent appreciation. In basic terms, the aloneness of instrumental music came to be conceived as a mark of value in its own right, a sign of that oft-repeated term, the music itself: the discrete, bounded work, product of a free-thinking artistic mind and represented at its most pristine in the text of the score, the idealized letter of which is the goal of the necessarily secondary act of performance. From this discourse grew the related notion of form itself, as opposed to any putatively representational content, as music’s proper meaning, form having been relieved of the burden of contentful significance. Music itself is constituted by its disavowal of extra-musical associations; it is self-sustaining, by definition. And just as the music is autonomous, disembodied, so too is the ideal listener, abstracted from the world and attentive only to the internal play of structure.
