Whenever we have mentioned Absolute Music of late there have been Members to pop up and deny its very existence.

What a curious phenomenon!

In fact the expression has been common currency for hundreds of years. We have already quoted here in the S.-thread:

http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=698.msg19936#msg19936

Percy Scholes and Sydney Grew. Let us turn to-day to Tovey (who played with Joachim incidentally):



"Neither the humble lover nor the master of pure musical form," he tells us, "need entertain any tolerance for theories that deny the supremacy of absolute music. But all history and experience go to prove that the absoluteness of music is a result; that this result remains independent of circumstances that may happen to make music illustrative; and, moreover, that it is a result very imperfectly attained, if at all attainable, by methods that have not early familiarized the musician with the musical treatment of words. It is no mere accident that three of the four greatest masters of absolute music, Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, spent more than half their time in setting words to music, and that the fourth, Beethoven, took enormous pains in the later part of his career to recover the art which he had almost neglected since he wrote exercises in Italian musical declamation for Salieri. On the other hand, the loudest propagandists of 'programme-music', such as Berlioz, are often almost angrily inattentive to what they call the subjects of their works. The titles of Berlioz's 'King Lear' Overture and 'Harold' Symphony are mere instances of shameless mendacity; and if these compositions have obscurities as absolute music the titles do nothing to illuminate them. A quartet of Beethoven is obviously absolute music, and all attempts to illustrate it by Beethoven's biography or the French Revolution are merely sentimental excuses for inattention.
"Nobody who is capable of measuring the gulf that separates the art of Palestrina from that of Bach and Handel will be surprised at the fact that the whole of the seventeenth century was spent in pioneer efforts and small sporadic achievements before such masters could emerge. What emerged with them was the stupendous phenomenon of absolute music, which, in spite of every practical and historical argument against it, has dominated all the central musical thoughts and instincts of later composers, even when they most explicitly oppose it.
"Plato obviously went too far when he suggested that the true astronomer should regard it as vulgar to observe the actual stars, but should rather think out how they ought ideally to behave; and Tyndall and Huxley still had reason to warn us of the pitfalls of the 'high-priori ' road. Bach, at all events, had both feet firmly planted on the ground, though he breathed the upper ether of absolute music, and in his last work, Die Kunst der Fuge, produced a masterpiece so abstract that musicians who might have been expected to know better have denied that it was music at all. In art, absoluteness and purity are not working hypotheses, but final results.
"My own practical experience is this: that, though I am by temperament and training the most abstract-minded of musicians and have from childhood practised composition by preference in polyphonic and pure sonata-forms, I find it quite impracticable to teach composition except as musical rhetoric, and I never realized the intense depth, power, and essential meaning of absolute music until I went through the experience of composing an opera. That experience taught me two things: first, that no music could illustrate a situation expressible in drama or lyrical poetry unless it was satisfactory as music; and secondly, that no music written merely to express words has ever achieved one-tenth of the intensity and power of absolute music."

Thus the concept "Absolute Music" is as we should have expected supported by this formidable triumvirate of critical authority. Yet the latest Member to deny it:

http://r3ok.myforum365.com/index.php?topic=698.msg19912#msg19912

cites for his part no authority whatever!

How can it be we wonder that such an erosion of the fundamental concepts and certainties of Western music criticism is permitted to take place in the minds of the people almost unhindered? Even Grove in its latest edition goes well off the rails with Scruton's sadly confused and misleading contribution in this area.

Anyway all Members are invited to express here their further thoughts about the subject.

Member Grew speaks of a supposed "absolute music" in a way that reminds some of us of Don Revie when (in the early 1970s) as Manager of Leeds United Football Club he declared that "from now on, we play 'absolute football'". Their success was by no means unqualified.

Mr Grew should be clear to us: his term "absolute music" has nothing at all to do with a supposed "absolute taste" (which he professes to possess in abundance, but which we lesser mortals evidently lack). It is - as all his stated sources plead - merely an alternative expression for "Abstract music". As Wikipedia makes very clear (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_music):


Some idea of the ways in which this term has changed in meaning over the years can be gleaned from Wikipedia's next sentence:


Now since music "without a concept, object, and purpose" is hardly likely to amount to anything remotely in agreement with Mr Grew's idea of "absolute taste", it must be clear that we are really arguing over technical terms rather than concepts.

So readers should not be (as I have unwittingly been all along) confused about what Mr Grew "means" by Absolute Music: he simply means (as do all of his stated sources) ABSTRACT MUSIC. There are no words, and no programmes around which the composer has structured his notes. The pieces are (whether by Schoenberg, Bach or anyone else) simply "abstract instrumental pieces".

Mr Grew's red herring has, all along, been his preposterous assertion that what he calls "absolute music" can lead to what he then calls "absolute standards of taste". In other words, having started with a purely technical term (of limited, and indeed dated utility), his contention seems to be that a full appreciation of objects that fall within its parameters depends upon an aesthetic prowess and discernment limited only to himself and other like-minded individuals (but of necessity - and desire! - outside the meaningful contemplation of those of us who are more 'ordinary').

I shall await Mr Grew's analysis of Shostakovich 8 with considerable expectation. I trust, if the exercise he is undertaking has any real and serious purpose, he will at least have the grace to spell the composer's name correctly (for a change - bearing in mind that his joke is a very old and stale one that has festered around for well over 12 months). If he doesn't, I shall not read beyond the first sentence of his report.

Baz

Don B
One of the best postings on this board yet! Thank you. 

I think that happens to all of us, Don. I don't remember ever seeing your posts, I'm afraid (though I do remember your name from 'the other place') - so it's certainly not a case of 'read and ignore'!

Anyway, I've just replied to your post on Crabbe, as it happens, so let's hope I'm not the kiss of death to that particular thread!

Ollie, any room for me in that bomb shelter...? 

Erm, well, I am about to retreat from these boards for the evening, so I'll pick up my share of shrapnel in the morning, but just before I go:
It seems to me that the sort of claims Tovey's making in that extract above, even in his first paragraph, are NOT entirely compatible with a reading which makes 'absolute music' interchangeable with 'abstract music'.

(Of course, that's not to say that it's easy to work out exactly what Tovey is claiming. Perhaps one instance where the answer to Stanley Cavell's famous question is 'Yes'!)

The Barrett on Grimes thread.

According to the Oxford Companion to Music, absolute music and abstract music are two terms that mean exactly the same thing: music that is not programme music. The Germans, however, use the term abstract music (spelt in a German way) to mean music that is dry and without feeling.