Absolute Music is a Sham
I won’t belabor my point: “Absolute music” is a sham. It doesn’t exist.
The classic definition of “absolute music” comes from Eduard Hanslick: “Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.”
A variation on this definition comes from Igor Stravinsky: “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,” which he later rephrased as, “Music expresses itself.”
Both of these assertions may seem, on their face, true.
However, they don’t hold up to scrutiny for a very simple reason: No music exists without a cultural context.
It all means something, even if that meaning isn’t baked into and perfectly retrievable from the notes themselves.
Here are two reasons why — and what it means for you as a composer.
1) Music Doesn’t Need Extramusical Associations to Mean Something
At a minimum, when “music expresses itself,” it is expressing a response to other music.
No one composes music in a vacuum. Everyone writes music influenced, in some way, by what has come before.
The meaning of an otherwise “absolute” piece of music is the contextual relationship it has to both the music that inspired it and the music it inspired in turn.
For instance, a late Beethoven string quartet would not exist without Haydn’s quartets. In turn, none of Bartók’s quartets would exist without Beethoven’s. This is the whole point of “genre” — music that refers to other music and gains meaning on the strength of their similarities.
These relationships run much deeper than genre. Scholars have shown that composers regularly recombine fragments of music when creating new works.
In other words, every dimension — of every phrase — of any piece of music you hear — will contain a complex web of associations to the music that came before it.
Or, to put it most succinctly, “Everything is a remix.”
2) “Cultural Context” Is Broader than Just Other Music — and It All Counts
To this point, we haven’t yet considered the broader cultural context around a piece of music.
In that context, it is equally untrue that music “speaks nothing but sound.”
Just as no one writes music in a vacuum, no one understands music in a vacuum.
Every listener will bring their experiences and associations — musical and extramusical, idiosyncratic and shared — to whatever piece they hear.
They will associate everything they hear with the film scores they’ve heard, the latest Cardi B song, the lullabies their parents sang, the childhood chants they sang on the playground, and so on.
They will further associate all of these musical experiences within their broader social and artistic contexts.
These associations are inescapable.
As a result, it is simply impossible for music to “express only itself,” because no human being can possibly experience music in that way.
The idea of “absolute music” makes as little sense as the idea that a ship can be “towed outside of the environment.”
Music is by definition both the relationships we create between sounds and the meanings we ascribe to those sounds and their relationships. Music only exists because we as humans have collectively created the idea of music. Without that meaning, those sounds would cease to exist as music.
Hence, a hypothetical music that “speaks nothing but sound” cannot exist. It is a self-devouring concept.
What Does This Mean for Composers?
To begin with, it means don’t take on face value the debates you learn from your music history class. You don’t have to understand music the way some white dudes from the 19th-century did.
It further means that you don’t need to cut yourself off from extramusical inspiration in the name of “absolute music.” It’s a bogus idea, and it’s utterly toxic if accepting it means cutting yourself off from your inspiration.
But, conversely, you also don’t need to advertise all the associations and inspirations that went into your music. You can keep those to yourself.
Furthermore, if you want to imagine your music in only technical terms and then give it abstract titles, you can do that, too.
There are good reasons for all of these choices, and there are no universal “right” answers here.
That said, the right answer for you is the one that
Feels right to you artistically and
Allows your music to resonate with your intended audience.
