Autonomist School

One of the central questions in the philosophy of music is whether music can represent.  As late as 1790, the dominant philosophical view of music was that it was incapable of conveying ideas, but by the time that E.T.A Hoffman reviewed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810, this view was rejected (Bonds, 2006).  Nowadays most philosophers of music agree that it is representational, and are concerned with how musical representations are possible (Kivy, 1991; Meyer, 1956; Robinson, 1994, 1997; Sparshoot, 1994; Walton, 1994).  In 19^th century musical aesthetics, though, this was strongly debated.  In his classic monograph The beautiful in music (Hanslick, 1854/1957), Eduard Hanslick argued against aesthetic theories that were based on the assumption that music communicated emotion.  He instead argued for an aesthetics in which the only elements of interest were the pure (nonrepresentational) structures of music.  This was the autonomist school of musical aesthetics.  It slogan, coined by Hanslick, was “the essence of music is sound and motion” (p. 48).  The autonomist school was an appeal for a scientific approach to aesthetics, which it believed was abandoned by sentimentalist appeals to emotion.  “The greatest obstacle to a scientific development of musical aesthetics has been the undue prominence given to the action of music on our feelings” (Hanslick, 1854/1957, p.89).

References:

1. Bonds, M. E. (2006). Music As Thought: Listening To The Symphony In The Age Of Beethoven. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
2. Hanslick, E. (1854/1957). The Beautiful In Music. New York: Liberal Arts Press.
3. Kivy, P. (1991). Sound And Semblance: Reflections On Musical Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
4. Meyer, L. B. (1956). Emotion and Meaning in Music. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press.
5. Robinson, J. (1994). The expression and arousal of emotion in music. In P. Alperson (Ed.), Musical Worlds: New Directions In The Philosophy Of Music (pp. 13-22). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
6. Robinson, J. (1997). Music And Meaning. Ithaca [N.Y.]: Cornell University Press.
7. Sparshoot, F. (1994). Music and feeling. In P. Alperson (Ed.), Musical Worlds: New Directions In The Philosophy Of Music (pp. 23-36). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
8. Walton, K. (1994). Listening with imagination: Is music representational? In P. Alperson (Ed.), Musical Worlds: New Directions In The Philosophy Of Music (pp. 47-62). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

(Added November 2010)