Music as Autobiography

Music has always been perceived as an art of emotions. But whose emotions do we hear in music? Responses to this question have changed radically and more than once since the eighteenth century. Enlightenment critics and composers thought of expression as the objective representation of an emotion or series of emotions, crafted in such a way as to evoke a calculated response in listeners. The belief that a composition might reflect its creators own personal emotions or innermost self was an assumption that did not take hold until the 1830s, driven by a convergence of philosophical, cultural, technological, and economic changes. New conceptions of the self, the rising prestige of the emotions, and the growth of a mass-market music culture combined to foster the perception of music as a form of emotional autobiography. By interpreting difficult new works as the outpourings of a unique individuality, listeners were able to gain access to an increasingly diverse and challenging array of musical idioms. Composers, in turn (Berlioz, Schumann, and Liszt, among others), encouraged the notion of music as autobiography in their own writings on music and in their strategies of self-promotion. But in the early decades of the twentieth century, this aesthetic collapsed almost as quickly as it had begun: many leading composersmost notably Igor Stravinskyreturned to an outlook that acknowledged expression as a construct. This renewed conception of expression as a detached, rational artifice became a key element of modernist aesthetics, from the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s through the high modernism of mid-century. The perception of a musical work as a manifestation of its composers innermost self has nevertheless proven remarkably resilient: even when acknowledged as a useful fiction, the notion of life-as-works and works-as-life retains a powerful hold on the Western imagination. Music as Autobiography, a 120,000-word monograph, will trace changing attitudes toward the idea of music as an art of personal self-revelation. It will draw extensively on fields outside of music including philosophy, psychology, economics, literature, drama, and the visual artsto present a comprehensive account of how attitudes toward the relationship between a composers life and works have changed over the past three centuries.