Matthew Pritchard (University of Leeds)
Why We Need Idealism in Music Aesthetics: A Reassessment

The role of philosophical idealism in the study of music has generally been seen as contentious – certainly from the standpoint of Anglo-American critical musicology over the last several decades. Idealism has been associated closely with Platonism, and a traditional ontology of music resting on the self-evident existence of musical “works” that embody certain defining traits independent of how they might be performed, mediated, or heard. That such an approach problematically reifies musical value is as obvious to ethnomusicologists or popular music scholars as it is to sociologists. Today the musical “imaginary museum” can no longer go unquestioned as the last resting-place of Western classical hegemonic ideals: the labour involved in sustaining it and the cultural interests it serves demand interrogation. A “materialist” critique is thus still de rigueur in many quarters – though the methodologies collected under that umbrella term have been as divergent as Adornian music analysis and feminist posthumanism. 

Drawing on themes and case studies from a forthcoming book, I argue that idealism exists in other and more defensible varieties than the Platonic, or indeed the Hegelian. Elements of (German) Idealist philosophical modes turn out to be essential to the realization of many critical musicologists’ ultimate goal: a theory of music’s mediation, or of its “relationality”. This should not be surprising. Mediation (Vermittlung) was first theorized by Fichte and Schelling in the 1790s, and a relational philosophy (including of art) became essential to their Romantic contemporaries such as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Romantic Idealist thought illustrates feminist scholar Naomi Schor’s overlooked claim that “Idealism is not one”, but rather a multifarious grouping of theories attentive to the role of ideas and ideals in aesthetic experience. Its historical representatives have been similarly diverse, ranging from Germaine de Staël, Pierre Leroux and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois and Rabindranath Tagore. 

Matthew Pritchard is Lecturer in Musical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds (UK). He has published articles on a number of topics in the history of German music aesthetics, from Kant and the idea of musical "character" to the concept of Gebrauchsmusik and the early development of modern styles of music analysis in the 1910s and 20s. In addition, he researches the music of Bengal, and specifically the songs and musical essays of the Bengali poet-composer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).