…well, fancy that.
so yesterday, in Berlioz class, we spent a great deal of it talking about Romantic aesthetics and music as a Romantic art. from previous posts, you all know how i feel about Romanticism but i have found myself in a bit of a quandary. what is it, you might ask? well, it’s that i love Hegel. yep, there, i’ve said it. i’m a big, big fan. not only that, but i kinda love his views on music and art. what is a neo-everything-ist like me to do?
it all started in my sophomore year of college. i had just started at a new university and didn’t know any better. didn’t know enough to know that taking a class entitled “Philosophy 303: Phenomenology and Transcendentalism” might be something from which to stay away. well, i was in it to win it so myself and eight other philosophy majors trudged our way through Heidigger, Kojève, Strauss and Hegel. after we spent the first two weeks trying to grasp the concepts of “chair” and “triangle” (those were our metaphysical examples) we got to the meat of the class and i made my best attempts at relating it to my own musical life. it was here that i realized that i was deeply and truly interested in the philosophy and aesthetics of music in which Hegel plays a huge part.
yes, i could go into the rise of German-based musicology alongside the rise of Germanic philosophical thought blah blah blah but i wont. that’s what google is for.
well in class, my brain suddenly remembered why i loved all of that in the first place. the idea of abstractness making something more tangible than not, concept and form embodying an ideal, hearing versus seeing — all brilliant things to play with and think about for days, if you have that kind of time. so with all of this in mind, can i still feel the way i do about the artists who tried to reflect these ideas in their works? to that, i’m not sure. all i know is, if Lélio is an example of Hegelian aesthetics, i’ll just pretend that Hegel never existed.
another musicology blog 