Rethinking Early Modern “Western Art Music”: A Global History Manifesto
Western Art Music (WAM) is understood to have specific geographic origins, but it is also believed to possess a capacity to transcend physical and social boundaries. Widespread belief in the transcendental potential of this artform has extended to aesthetic and philosophical domains, leading to a pr...
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2019 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/216688 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/216688 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Western Art Music (WAM) Geographic origins Conceptual imperialism |
| Resumo: | Western Art Music (WAM) is understood to have specific geographic origins, but it is also believed to possess a capacity to transcend physical and social boundaries. Widespread belief in the transcendental potential of this artform has extended to aesthetic and philosophical domains, leading to a prevailing view of WAM’s “universality,” and the autonomy of the musical “work” and of “absolute music.” The artform is thus implied to have immanent hegemonic potential.WAM is commonly imagined as unique, exceptional, essentialist—and yet somehow “universal,” accessible, and a form of cosmopolitan currency. In public discourse (and some scholarly discourse) a number of practitioners, critics, and patrons think of these conditions applying uniformly to more than a millennium of “Western” practice, reflecting in some ways what Lydia Goehr has termed “conceptual imperialism”: the tendency since circa 1800 to project and impose new ideals retrospectively onto historical understandings of the past, “to make it look as if musicians had always thought about their activities in modern terms.” In the early modern period, however, notions of the object and function of “art music” were radically different from those we ascribe to that concept today, many of which are inherited largely intact from the Romantic era. |
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