Crisis and Turning points of Modern Music Aesthetics

The article provides a survey of musical aesthetics as academic discipline today, showing some critical points and looking for new perspectives. 1. During the past century the discussion about music become both more large and more advanced. Musicology expanded itself in Italian, European and Angloamerican universities with a variety of new research fields. Music theorists and enhnomusicologists raised new questions. Historical musicology and musical philology lost indeed the priority among the musicological disciplines and music theory freed itself from its main task of introducing into compositional technique to face more general problems. At the same time philosophy (from phenomenology to hermeneutics, negative dialectic, deconstructionism, post structuralism) became an important part of musicologist’s background together with specific disciplines such as linguistics, semiotics and information theory. Composer contributed to the general discussion about music. In this situation music aesthetics as philosophical reflection about music seems to be weakened if not completely absorbed by other disciplines or at least turned into a cross-area among specific disciplines and general philosophical reflection. 2. It’s worth to recall that music aesthetics orbits around two foci: music and philosophy. When it goes around the philosophical focus, it can be understood as a) a specialized branch of general aesthetics or as individual philosophical project focused on music; b) as discussion forum about both musical commonsensical and logical definition and description; c) as critical undertaking concerned with an art dimension which resists the overwhelming power of rationality (Nietzsche, Bloch, Adorno, Barthes). In the countries where the German musicological paradigm has established itself (such as in Italy) music aesthetics takes a role in systematic musicology as a specific and distinct branch of general musicology. In Italy and in Germany music aesthetics both in its philosophical and in its more musicological version could not escape the fate deserved to general philosophical reflection: philosophy fades away and becomes history of philosophy. Moreover relying on the seminal studies of Terry Eagleton, Friedrich Kittler, Martha Woodmansee and Stephen Rumpf, some trends of Anglo-American musicology seems to be mainly concerned with the deconstruction of the pivotal concepts of classical music aesthetics. 3. Typical questions about music aesthetics are raised by the musicological fringes of cultural studies. This cultural turn can be interpreted both as a drift or as a disclosure of a new field. The old aesthetical paradigm based on European instrumental music is growing old, if confronted with the global dimension of music. Music philosophy had inquired the possibility of a musical meaning; cultural studies are concerned with music as social practice. Erasing the difference between cultural systems and social practices could be so mistaken as claiming that exists something called “the purely musical”. What get lost within is the negotiation between the specific music knowledge and philosophical horizon carried out by musical aesthetics in the two past centuries. The role of this discipline was particularly successful in the reflection about the paradigm of sound and that of meaning, showing where those two poles are approaching and where are distancing themselves. Music aesthetics could once provide a foundation for the possibility of musical meaning, basing on the alleged universality of taste. The challenge of music aesthetics can only move from arguing the universality but claiming a historical and social meaning for music. Rereading Adorno “against the grain”, particularly the conception of aesthetics as commentary, interpretation and critique can be a intriguing opening of a new musical discourse.