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An Incomplete Project: Modernism, Formalism and the ‘Music Itself’

An Incomplete Project: Modernism, Formalism and the ‘Music Itself’ Analytical practice is too often discussed only by those who are instinctively critical of it or insufficiently familiar with it. This may seem a big claim, yet if the external assault on analytical practice has achieved something like critical mass within the last two decades, too frequently it has remained at the level of the general, the undifferentiated, even the caricature. More than twenty years after its original publication, one can still sense the impact of Joseph Kerman's intervention, and not least his claim that `analysts have avoided value judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and the like ± all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry'.1 Certainly analysis has always met with a degree of suspicion among those who remain wary of its alleged quasi-scientific pretensions or who dislike its propensity for adopting prohibitively complex modes of presentation. In a lecture given in 1969, Theodor Adorno observed that `the word ``analysis'' easily associates itself in music with the idea of all that is dead, sterile and farthest removed from the living work of art. One can well say http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Music Analysis Wiley

An Incomplete Project: Modernism, Formalism and the ‘Music Itself’

Hooper, Giles
Music Analysis , Volume 23 (2‐3) – Jul 1, 2004
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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
ISSN
0262-5245
eISSN
1468-2249
DOI
10.1111/j.0262-5245.2004.00206.x
Publisher site
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Abstract

Analytical practice is too often discussed only by those who are instinctively critical of it or insufficiently familiar with it. This may seem a big claim, yet if the external assault on analytical practice has achieved something like critical mass within the last two decades, too frequently it has remained at the level of the general, the undifferentiated, even the caricature. More than twenty years after its original publication, one can still sense the impact of Joseph Kerman's intervention, and not least his claim that `analysts have avoided value judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and the like ± all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry'.1 Certainly analysis has always met with a degree of suspicion among those who remain wary of its alleged quasi-scientific pretensions or who dislike its propensity for adopting prohibitively complex modes of presentation. In a lecture given in 1969, Theodor Adorno observed that `the word ``analysis'' easily associates itself in music with the idea of all that is dead, sterile and farthest removed from the living work of art. One can well say

Journal

Music Analysis – Wiley

Published: Jul 1, 2004

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