ABSTRACT
The most impressive representative of the opposed formalist theory that the abstract art of music is devoid of any human meaning and is merely the source of a distinctive kind of deep and harmless pleasure was Edmund
Gurney; and the severest challenge to a humanist theory of music is presented by his massive and remarkable work The Power of Sound.1 In this work Gurney attempted to show that we need bring to music no special qualities of character or intellect, and no extra-musical interests or values, but only an isolated sense of abstract proportion; for music presents forms that have no important connection with anything outside music, and the rewards of music are entirely self-contained. Our love of music is essentially unrelated to anything else that we value: music speaks of nothing that independently matters to us.
