Programming the Absolute
Subtitle: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: October 21, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780691001494
Subjects: Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830); Romantic music (c 1830 to c 1900); c 1800 to c 1900; History & Criticism - General; Genres & Styles - Classical; Music/Songbooks; Music; Germany; Aesthetics; Genres & Styles - International; Comparative Literature; Music / Classical; Philosophy; 19th century; Absolute music; Philosophy and aesthetics
First sentence: the hundred eyes in his head or all over his body; panoptes means "all seeing." Total vision, the complete regime of the eye, constitutes beauty as synonymous with truth.
Description: "Programming the Absolute discusses the notorious opposition between absolute and program music as a true dialectic that lies at the heart of nineteenth-century German music. Beginning with Beethoven, Berthold Hoeckner traces the aesthetic problem of musical meaning in works by Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, and Schoenberg, whose private messages and public predicaments are emblematic for the cultural legacy of this rich repertory.".

"After Romanticism had elevated music as a language "beyond" language, the ineffable spurred an unprecedented proliferation of musical analysis and criticism. Taking his cue from Adorno, Hoeckner develops the idea of a 'hermeneutics of a moment,' which holds that musical meaning crystallizes only momentarily - in a particular passage, a progression, even a single note. And such moments can signify as little as a fleeting personal memory or as much as the whole of German music.".

"Although absolute music emerged with a matrix of values - the integrity of the subject, the aesthetic autonomy of art, and the intrinsic worth of high culture - that are highly contested in musicology today, Hoeckner argues that we should not completely discard the ideal of a music that continues to offer moments of transcendence and liberation."--BOOK JACKET.