Absolute Music: Its relevance to the articulation of meaning in contemporary artistic practice

Abstract

This research assesses the relevance of eighteenth century ideas of absolute music to understanding the articulation of meaning in contemporary artistic practice. More specifically, it proposes that issues of form and content in purely instrumental music might help understand the artistic split that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century following Conceptual Art’s rejection of the dominant formalist aesthetic paradigm. It proposes that music, by nature of its immaterial ontology, provides useful insights required to re-examine the role of language, emotion, and form in contemporary conceptually aligned artistic practices. It begins by discussing theories of representation, with the intention of establishing absolute music as a theoretical model with which to examine form/content relationships, and their proximity to natural language narratives in the arts. It moves on to consider how early German Romantic notions of autonomy and feeling relate to the creative artistic frame and the formalist/conceptualist debate as exemplified by Clement Greenberg and Joseph Kosuth. Referencing Richard Wagner, it discusses the influence of musical score to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, and the evidence for heteronomous reference in abstract painting. Equally, it considers the failure of anti-formalist Conceptual artists to prevent work from being perceived by way of its formal properties and how this differs from Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the non-retinal. My approach draws on Peircian semiotic principals and Noël Carroll’s analysis of representation. It extends Leonard Meyer’s theory of embodied and designative musical meaning to consider, by way of examples drawn from Gustav Mahler’s music and twenty-first century conceptualism, the role of non-semantic content in visual art and natural language. Referencing recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, this thesis proposes that the dichotomous relationship between reason and feeling is more complex than previously thought. It concludes by considering Kant’s notion of the aesthetic idea and its implications for contemporary practice.