Possible Interactions Between Musical Analysis and Aesthetic Judgment
Antenor Corrêa – [email protected]
Universidade Federal de Brasília
It is possible to verify, since the beginning of the twentieth century, several transformations and oppositions to tonal system, which hitherto was the basic paradigm of classical western music at least since the eighteenth century. The passage from common practice (Piston, 1941) to individual processes applied by composers for structuring their music occurred as consequence of those transformations. In order to replace the tonal system, composers experimented different procedures aiming to ensure the artistic consistency of their works. Harmony was one of most fertile fields where those experiments took place, and where the differences in relationship to the tonal system were most sharply felt. Since the final of nineteenth century, many harmonic attempts resulted from the idea of emancipation of dissonance, such as harmony with no tonal relationships, suspended tonality, floating tonality, polytonality, polymodality, pantonality, and free atonalism. Those proposals culminated in appearance of twelve-tone technique by Schoenberg in 1923.
Alongside harmony, other compositional parameters were also subject to modification. Development of timbre would lead to klangfarbenmelodie, sound composition, and the introduction of noise by the artists related to Futurism in music. Moreover, researches involving timbre contributed to generate the techniques of electroacoustic and spectral music. In the rhythmic realm, emancipation implied in the liberation of: invariant metric structure, use of regular pulse, and constant tempo. Those new procedures would lead, for example, to the concept of metric modulation used by Elliot Carter. Musical forms were also rethought. Large symphonic movements were contrasted to webernian bagatelles. Traditional formal models were renewed or abandoned, and the idea of structure seems to have replaced the notion of form. Such transformations could not pass without affect music reception, whose most representative philosophic formalization lies on the Aesthetic.
In the turning of the twentieth century, the set of postulates that sustained Aesthetic came to collapse. Regarding traditional music, stylistics patterns, which belonged to distinct periods, made possible the classification of works within their respective historical periods. Nevertheless, the pulverization of common practice disallowed the edification of a long-reach Aesthetic. For this reason, it was necessary establish other criteria to bear the formulation of aesthetic values. It was no longer possible to count on types and genres in order to formulate an aesthetic judgment. That aspect precluded the transcendent interpretation of works, that means, the sort of judgment that exceed ordinary limits of the work. For this reason, transcendent interpretations gave place to an immanent approach of music work. In this sense, the music was considered according its own essence, in its intrinsic features. In order to confront the music in its peculiarities it was demanded from Aesthetic a new method that would allow the access to those internal characteristics. That method surged with the association between Aesthetic and Musical Analysis. Aesthetic contributed with the philosophical background and analysis provided an epistemic access to generative structures of composition.
This entire historic context received deep reflections by Dahlhaus. The matter involving the collapse of aesthetic and the quest for new manners to consider the music phenomena are the kernel of Analysis and Value Judgment (1970). In his book, Dahlhaus pointed out to the viability of using musical analysis to support value judgment.
In this text, I aim to present some notes regarding those possibilities introduced by Dahlhaus. My intention is to reflect about the use of musical analysis as means to substantiate an aesthetic judgment. In other words, to provide an analytical ground in order to enable the achievement of an aesthetic valuation based in some objective criteria. To verify this hypothesis, I will consider some of Dahlhaus writings and presenting analytical considerations about Arnold Schoenberg Third String Quartet Op. 30 (1927).
