Absolute Music and Descriptive Music
In the nineteenth century, there were two opposing conceptions of instrumental music.
On the one hand, descriptive music subordinates the musical discourse to an external element, such as a landscape, narrative, or image; this poeticisation of music emancipated it from traditional forms. The orchestral works of Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique) as well as Liszt’s symphonic poems (Mazeppa) and piano pieces (Années de pèlerinage) are emblematic of this approach. In response, the paradigm of “absolute music” proclaimed the autonomy of sound. In 1854 the critic Hanslick, a champion of Schumann’s and Brahms’s symphonies, argued that beauty is immanent in music itself, which, as mere form in motion, expresses nothing. It is important to remember, however, that both currents originated from the idealism that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had raised instrumental (i.e., wordless) music to the peak of the hierarchy of genres, by virtue of its ambiguity, which, by leaving room for the listener’s imagination, offers access to transcendence.
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publication date : 17/06/25
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