Hauptmann and Schenker: Two Adaptations of Hegelian Dialectics

Abstract

If the understanding of musical problems exhibited by philosophers is any indication of the understanding of philosophy likely to be shown by musicians, I must begin with humility if not embarrassment. To be sure, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a case in point, for if Hegel's encyclopedic knowledge of Western civilization was missing a volume, it was that on music. It's not so much his ignorance of the technical aspects of music, which he explicitly admits, nor his strained historiography of the Romantic arts wherein music gives way to the higher art of poetry just as religion gives way to the higher thought of philosophy, nor even his bad call, misplacing the demise of Western art music somewhere before the generation of Beethoven. Hegel is not even adept at locating his own historical and metaphysical principles within musical art; nor does he seem to be in touch with the impact music was making and would continue to make on his own culture.1 Yet musicians were influenced by Hegelian ideas, and continue to be so. Ah, but there is no surer way to lose one's orientation than to venture into that dense thicket some call the history of ideas. (So arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear.) Yet ideas about music are grounded in a larger context, and if we care about understanding those ideas we need to confront that context.