From The Freedom Values To Fundamental Of Survival

The nineteenth century was a century in which Western music and art blossomed,and the field of music aesthetics was also characterized by a hundred schools of thought.Traditional historical studies of music aesthetics have examined this period from the perspective of the confrontation and opposition between the major schools of thought in nineteenth-century music aesthetics.But this is not enough to summarize the logic underlying the evolution of nineteenth-century music aesthetics.The common goal of all these schools of thought was to provide an answer to the value of music as a self-contained and independent object.An examination of the historical form of Western musical culture reveals that for a long period of time,music lacked the freedom and independence expected of an artistic discipline.On the one hand,the value of music’s freedom has long been dependent on its union with elements other than sound forms.On the other hand,musicians have not been able to achieve an independent social and economic status.But with the flourishing of instrumental music in the early nineteenth century,the idea of "absolute music" was gradually constructed;at the same time,the flourishing of public space allowed musicians to break away from their personal attachment to religious and secular aristocrats and transform themselves into free social artists.It was in this historical context that music gained its independence as a free and pure aesthetic object,and this led to the pursuit of an aesthetic theory that started from the very essence of music.In other words,the nineteenth century was the century in which the foundations of Western music aesthetics were laid,and the first thing that music aesthetics had to face in this period was the questioning of the value of its own object of study.The major schools of thought in nineteenth-century Western music aesthetics answered this question from their own perspectives,and together they accomplished the construction of a new self-contained and independent object in philosophical and aesthetic discourse.While " emotivism " music aesthetics establishes a connection between the ideational nature of the artwork and the subjectivity of the author,formalist " autonomies-aesthetics" affirms the beauty of music as a movement of musical sounds,self-contained in this autonomic form.These two theories of music aesthetics elaborate on the inherent aesthetic value of music from the perspective of the two fundamental categories of existence:content and form.And on this basis,some musicians began to try to elevate the object value of music to a new level.Wagner’s early thoughts of music aesthetics follows this path.Schopenhauer’s voluntarism linked music directly to the metaphysical nature of the world,the "will," and saw it as an important way of being for human beings.Wagner’s later theoretical writings and compositional practices converge with Schopenhauer’s music aesthetics and existential ethics,while Nietzsche transcends Schopenhauer’s pessimism and negativity to pursue a rousing vitality in music.Although these three thinkers’ specific conceptions of music aesthetics were not without their differences,in general,they together created a new paradigm of music aesthetics that no longer looked at and studied music from a realistic or psychic perspective,but rather from a metaphysical essentialist perspective,a methodological perspective of human existence.It was here that nineteenth-century music aesthetics self-construction of music shifted from the pursuit of essence to the pursuit of value.