Symbolism contributions

Symbolism contributions

Significant contributions to musical theory have been made in the 20th century by several investigators who may be classified as symbolists, though most of them exhibit formalist, expressionist, and psychological elements as well. The most influential (and controversial) work has been done by Langer. Her most adamant critics (such as John Hospers) have objected to her use of the term symbol that must, in their lexica, stand for something definite; she takes pains to ascribe this more limited usage to the term signal. The more general use of the term symbol that she endorses has a long history, notably in such 19th-century figures as Goethe, Carlyle, and the French Symbolist poets. Langer is accused of having somewhat weakened her argument through a vacillating terminology, and she has described the musical symbol as “unconsummated” because of its ambiguity. But the validity of her theory does not depend upon the term symbol; her thought, indeed, has much in common with that of Edmund Gurney, who does not employ the term and whose “ideal motion,” if substituted for symbol, would remove most of her critics' objections. Her use of symbol is nevertheless defensible; she construes art as a “symbolic analogue of emotive life,” rendering the “forms of sentient being” into intelligible configurations. She is a naturalist; she sees art as organic in origin, and she echoes the view, long held among symbolists, that artistic form and content compose an indissoluble unity that each art manifests according to its peculiar conditions. The symbolism of music is therefore tonal (or, at its broadest, auditory) in character and can be realized only in time; in psychological experience, time assumes an ideal guise. (Painting and sculpture, in their distinctive modalities, embody ideal space.) Langer embraces all the arts in her purview. The U.S. musical theorist Gordon Epperson's The Musical Symbol (1967) is an application of her concepts, with modifications, intensively to music.