ABSTRACT
In protecting music against the intrusion of social and political critiques, the idea that the musical work is an opus absolutum et perfectum sets the stage for abandoning the concept of music’s aesthetic autonomy. Through reversing music’s divorce from its surrounding social contexts, new critical practices dislodged the principle on which music’s-and especially Western art music’s-canonic value was based. In the face of mounting suspicions in feminist criticism, post-structuralist thinking, and cultural studies, the idea that music is aesthetically self-sufficient gave way to interpretations of the political agendas behind seemingly purely musical processes. The artifice of tonal music’s self-actualizing perfection particularly came under attack. The conviction that all great works adhered to the ideal of organic development that Heinrich Schenker placed at the center of his method of analysis elicited the kind of riposte that Joseph Kerman provided in his critique of the ideological role played by theory and analysis. Where Schenker took a lead in justifying tonal music’s high art status by forging a link between aesthetic perfection and a popularized Hegelian view of history, Kerman anticipated the ruin of the ideology of organicism.32 The unifying principle of tonal closure accordingly assumed the force of a rational construct that was comparable to that of reason within the Hegelian system of thought. Within this system of thought, reason manifested itself as rationally necessary to the movement through which Spirit became conscious of itself as absolute. Consequently, the idea that tonal music especially harbored a principle of reason that supported absolutist political agendas breached nineteenth-century ramparts. The metaphysics of absolute music offered a more readily accessible target than did the hubris of the part of the subject in mastering history conceptually. Hence, through upending the traditional cultural defenses of high art music, critiques of music’s, and most notably absolute music’s, aesthetic stature unmask social and political values that are concealed within music’s formal characteristics and processes.
