A New Music Criticism?

Abstract

By I understand here the discussion of works of art in any and all ways that might be considered relevant to their understanding and appreciation. By interpretation I understand the discussion of works of art purporting to explicate their meaning. By I understand the discussion of works of art that concentrates solely on their phenomeno logical, syntactic and formal properties. People have been writing about music, or things with at least strong family resemblances to what we recognize as music, for a very long time: since Plato, anyway. And at least some of this writing can, I think, be plausibly described as criticism. But musical criticism in the modern mold?as an identifiable, more or less self-contained discipline?is of fairly recent vintage, its emergence closely associated with the rise and emancipa tion of instrumental in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen turies. It is surprising neither that musical criticism gained its autonomy in lock step with the emerging autonomy of pure instrumental music, nor (which is also the case) that the philosophical problems we associate with it were defined in just that process. For while remained predominantly vocal, and a text, therefore, all but omnipresent, musical criticism was never merely musical criticism, the problem of talking intelligibly and infor matively about alone never clearly perceived or articulated. My subject is criticism in its modern, emancipated form. And I shall be dealing exclusively with the discipline of writing about that is pure: that possesses, in other words, neither text nor title nor program nor any other extra-musical elements; what I like to call music Thus, whenever, from now on, I refer to musical criticism, or musical analysis, or musical interpretation, I should be taken, unless it is otherwise apparent, to be talking about the criticism or the analysis or the interpreta tion of pure instrumental music; of alone.