How Film Music Works
2002
There has been a tendency in European and Americanthought since the Enlightenment to categorize music asa particularly pure art. Music has been understood to produce meaning only on the most abstract, spiritual, or formal levels. Baroque and pre-Baroque notions that, for example, specific scales or phrases might have specific meanings have been denounced since the Enlightenment. Music became the foremost example of autonomous art, art for art’s sake. Communication of meaning came to be considered outside the realm of music’s tasks; western instrumental art music is called “absolute.” As Stravinsky put it: Expressing the same view, Adorno argues in his typology of musical listeners that music listening ought to be concerned with form, not imagined meaning. The fourth type of listener in his hierarchy is the “emotional listener,” about whom he says: And for one last example-film composer Irwin Bazelon states definitively that: Bazelon suggests here that music speaks only in and of its own aesthetics; according to him, music is both nonrepresentational and nonreferential. Bazelon, Adorno, Stravinsky, and many other writers on music thus contend that meanings heard in music stem simply from the bad habits of listeners who have not been trained properly.