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Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter

Agnieszka Malinowska Fellow
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Music & literatureAnalyticModern EuropeanEduard HanslickPeter Kivy#formalism#hanslick#musical-meaning#reading-group
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Its coordinates: 5.8 Philosophy of Music and Literature

Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with others. Let us fix that.

Translation: Geoffrey Payzant's On the Musically Beautiful (Hackett, 1986) is the standard English version and follows the later editions. German readers, the original is easy to find.

Plan, four weeks.

  1. Chapters 1 and 2: the attack on the "aesthetics of feeling" and the claim that representing feelings is not the content of music.
  2. Chapter 3: the musically beautiful, and the famous formula of music as forms moved in sound.
  3. Chapters 4 and 5: what music does to listeners, and the contrast between aesthetic listening and what he calls pathological listening.
  4. Chapters 6 and 7: music and nature, and the concepts of form and content.

Something to keep in mind: Hanslick was a powerful Viennese critic and an opponent of the Wagnerians, who repaid him in kind. It is easy to read the book as a party pamphlet. I want to read it as an argument and see how much of it survives.

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5 replies

  1. Tomasz Szewczak

    Fellow

    Week 1. The argument is cleaner than I expected. A definite feeling, love or grief, involves a thought about an object: love of someone, grief at something. Music without words cannot present thoughts or objects. So music cannot represent definite feelings. What it can present is their dynamics, the motion of feeling: faster, slower, swelling, fading. That is a valid argument; the question is whether the first premise is true.

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  2. Agnieszka Malinowska

    Fellow

    Week 2. Payzant renders the key phrase as "tonally moving forms", and my students prefer "forms moved in sound". Either way the images around it are wonderful: Hanslick compares music to the arabesque and to a kaleidoscope, patterns that unfold and transform and are beautiful as patterns, without representing anything. As an organist who plays a great deal of Bach, I find this convincing for fugues and much less so for the slow movements of the Romantic composers he loved.

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  3. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    Week 2, from an architect who has never read a page of music theory. The arabesque comparison interested me because in the nineteenth century "arabesque" meant a European ornamental scroll, but the word points back to the ornament of the Islamic world. There, abstract pattern was not considered empty of meaning; it was thought to point beyond representation. If Hanslick's arabesque is beautiful without content, the ornaments behind the word suggest a third possibility: meaning without representation.

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  4. Martín Iriarte

    Fellow

    Week 3. Hanslick's scorn for "pathological" listeners, people who sit half-asleep and let music wash feelings over them, is funny and a little cruel. As a reader of Freud I would defend them slightly. Some people use music to feel what they cannot otherwise allow themselves to feel. That isn't aesthetic listening in his sense, but it may be one of the most important things music does. His distinction is useful precisely because it separates two goods, not because one is worthless.

  5. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    Week 4. Reading this after Peter Kivy is illuminating. Kivy later called his own position "enhanced formalism": music is pure form, as Hanslick said, but expressive properties like sadness are part of that form, heard in it the way we see sadness in a Saint Bernard's face. That keeps most of Hanslick's argument and gives back the emotion-talk as description. I suspect Hanslick's dynamics-of-feeling concession was already halfway there.

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