Referentialists and nonreferentialists

Referentialists and nonreferentialists
Among those who seek and propound theories of musical meaning, the most persistent disagreement is between the referentialists (or “heteronomists”), who hold that music can and does refer to meanings outside itself, and the nonreferentialists (who are sometimes called formalists or absolutists), who maintain that the art is autonomous and “means itself.” The Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, in his The Beautiful in Music (German edition published 1854), was a strong proponent of music as an art of intrinsic principles and ideas; yet even Hanslick, ardent formalist though he was, struggled with the problem of emotion in music. Hanslick's views have been classified as a modified heteronomous theory.
One looks in vain for an extremist of either persuasion, referentialist or nonreferentialist. Igor Stravinsky first achieved fame as a composer of ballet music, and his works throughout his career were rich in extramusical associations. It would be a comfortable simplification to ally referentialism with “program” music and nonreferentialism with “absolute” music. But the problem cannot be resolved by such a choice, if only, first of all, because extramusical referents can vary in complexity from a mere descriptive title to the convolutions of the Wagnerian leitmotiv, in which a particular musical phrase is consistently associated with a particular person, place, or thing. The referentialist does not require an explicit program (which may, when present, be altogether too meagre by his canons), and the nonreferentialist does not necessarily denigrate program music, though he makes a point of distinguishing between the extramusical program and the musical meaning. The contemporary U.S. theorist Leonard Meyer, in his Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), speaks of “designative” and “embodied” meanings; he recognizes both kinds in music but appears to give equal weight to the extrinsic and intrinsic.