ABSTRACT
Like love, there are very few references to music as both a creative form and a social phenomenon in the social theoretical tradition, at least in its so-called classical heritage. Perhaps love with all its shades, and music with all of its tonal qualities, simply go together, as the two great expressive, yet impossible media. Perhaps Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias are the exceptions here, and it is not simply due to what might, illegitimately, be seen as limits imposed by musical-technical knowledge. Each of them writes on music and love – in rationalistic and power-saturated terms (Weber), in anthropologicalrhythmic terms (Simmel), and in civilisational-figurational terms (Elias) (Weber, 1970: 323-359, 1958; Simmel, 1978; Elias, 1983, 1993). As music is our topic here, I want to suggest that each elides another interpretive possibility in their writings on music – of theorising music as a spatial form, and one not only constituted through time or rhythm, and melody. It is not only the space of performance, of reception, of listening and interpretation that is of concern here, but also the internal space of the creation, arrangement and voicing of that space. This spatiality creates what might be termed a specific musicoreflective space where thinking, feeling and particular moods are created, performed and interacted with. Before turning to the works of Simmel and Weber, especially, it is worth making some preliminary remarks on aesthetics and music more generally.1
