{"title":"A Minimal Violence: Seven Theses on the Classical Style","authors":"Naomi Waltham-Smith","doi":"10.7202/1054025AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1054025AR","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes a series of speculative and likely controversial theses about the ethical possibilities and dangers of the Classical style. Taking a concept of ethics that is both Heideggerian and subtractive in the mode of recent French thought, it begins by arguing that music itself—in its structures and stylistic features and not merely in the contingent circumstances of its genesis or reception—is capable of being an ethics. The next crucial claim is that, insofar as ethics is a question of proximity to one’s Being, the Classical style is minimally violent in Derrida’s sense both on account of the place it occupies in the emergence of an aesthetic disposition and, moreover, insofar as its construction hinges on a process of articulation, that is on the separation of form and content, of convention and expression. Finally, the article assesses how the Classical style responds to the fundamental principle of division at its heart.","PeriodicalId":394446,"journal":{"name":"Enjeux éthiques et valeurs morales en histoire de la musique","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124326293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Valeurs morales et controverses autour de l’avant-garde musicale : Heinrich Schenker contre le chromatisme","authors":"E. Buch","doi":"10.7202/1054024AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1054024AR","url":null,"abstract":"Dans les contextes d’affrontement suscités par les avant-gardes, les acteurs font face à des incertitudes récurrentes quant à comment construire ce qu’on appelle un syllogisme pratique, c’est-à-dire un syllogisme dont la conclusion est non pas une vérité mais une action. Que ce soit pour défendre la validité de ces oeuvres ou pour la mettre en cause, les uns et les autres doivent répondre, face à l’expérience d’une musique véritablement inouïe, à la question pratique par excellence : que faire pour bien agir ? Cette problématique est explorée ici à partir de l’analyse d’un unique passage de l’Harmonielehre d’Heinrich Schenker, un livre paru à Vienne en 1906. Peu avant la création des premières oeuvres atonales d’Arnold Schoenberg, l’auteur y condamne comme un « dol » toute tentative d’affaiblir la tonalité, en prônant comme un devoir moral la « stigmatisation » (brandmarken) d’une telle attitude. Le texte soulève ainsi des questions centrales à propos des rapports entre art, morale, droit et violence.","PeriodicalId":394446,"journal":{"name":"Enjeux éthiques et valeurs morales en histoire de la musique","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126149330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Allegory and Ethics in Beethoven’s Fidelio","authors":"Stephen C. Rumph","doi":"10.7202/1054023AR","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1054023AR","url":null,"abstract":"Few operas foreground ethics as clearly as Beethoven’s Fidelio. Yet the heroic tale of liberation from political oppression resists narrowly historical interpretations, availing itself equally to revolutionary and reactionary interpretations. Allegory theory offers a new approach to the ethical meanings of Fidelio. Allegory, in which characters embody moral qualities, preserved a hierarchical and theocentric view of society, in opposition to the humanistic outlook of Enlightenment mimesis. Allegory and mimesis coexist in Fidelio, whose title character traces a lineage to the Christian morality play. This essay compares the 1805 original of Beethoven’s opera (Leonore) with the 1814 version (Fidelio), concentrating on the final scene and the character of Marzelline. I argue that the 1814 version enhances the allegorical dimension, simplifying the characters and reducing moral complexities. Fidelio models the traditional “consensus society” of pre-Revolutionary Europe, offering a vision congenial to Congress of Vienna audiences.","PeriodicalId":394446,"journal":{"name":"Enjeux éthiques et valeurs morales en histoire de la musique","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127900591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}