Absolute Music Construction Meaning

New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism

by Daniel K. L. Chua

This book examines the intellectual history of instrumental music, in particular the idea of absolute music. It tries to show how certain ideas in philosophy, theology and the sciences affect the meaning and, indeed, the existence of instrumental music, and how, in turn, instrumental music is used to resolve or exemplify certain problems in modern culture. Instead of existing in a pure and autonomous form, music is woven back into the epistemological fabric and entangled with numerous discourses, thus demonstrating the centrality of music in the construction of meaning.

Genres: Music

328 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 1999

About the author

Daniel K. L. Chua is Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts and Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Beethoven & Freedom, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning, and The Galitzin Quartets of Beethoven.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daniel K. L. Chua has written one of the most astonishing books I have ever read. A tour de force of cultural history, Chua writes an intricately linked daisy chain of 35 chapters (!) to sketch the successive rises and falls of absolute music in modernity.

This is not only musicology, however, but genuine cultural history as he shows that the very idea of absolute music, and especially the ideology of it, belongs to the Enlightenment itself. Absolute music thus is both artefact and sign of modernity's hubris.

Chua plays a dangerous game, leaping among heuristics from Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno while juggling most of modern Continental intellectual history and modern instrumental music (with appropriate references to opera as well). He does so with both boldness (smashing away at the late Beethoven as "drivel") and brio (positively dancing from Descartes to Nietzsche).

Only at the very end does he teeter on the edge of bombast, perhaps giddy with what he has pulled off, but he keeps his balance and ends with one of the most incisive judgments upon modernity ("and its post-modern side-kick" [p. 290]) I have encountered...and also an extraordinarily delicate, and challenging, invitation to consider redemption as the only way out of modernity's vicious cycles.

I have just enough musical training to follow most of Chua's examples (I've studied a bit at the university level), so I can't say more than that he seems to make powerful sense of what he describes. I have considerably more expertise in European intellectual history, and Chua seems simply dazzling in his deft negotiation of so many difficult thinkers.

I come away from this book confirmed in my sense that too many books, including some Very Big Ones, have bitten off 'way more than they can chew when it comes to analyzing the modern mind. Chua doesn't pretend to have "covered" such a subject, but he illuminates it time and again in this unlikely way, and if you like this sort of thing, you'll love this book.