The double truth in Hanslick’s aesthetics

Abstract

The text Il Bello musicale, by Eduard Hanslick, which is reference regarding musical aesthetics in general until nowadays, has contradictions in its thoughts, some of those were reviewed by its author in the course of the bibliographic life of his work, but, instead of being in fact problematic from a theoretical point of view, that makes appear a double truth in Hanslick’s thoughts. On analyzing texts and modifications done by the author, as well as the origin of concepts used by Hanslick in his work, from a metalinguistic approach of the concepts, and observing terminologies, metaphors and analogies used by him, it is possible to notice the evolution of two lines of thinking that coexist: one with analytical characteristics that, in fact, bases the well-known hanslickian formalism, and which makes the musical content level match with the grammatic-syntatical level of music, remaining, thus, “pure form”; and the other inserts, on the other hand, the musical aesthetics of Hanslick in a tradition of musical content attribution through analogies and metaphors already integrated by musical theory itself as only possibility of speaking of music, for it is necessary to deal with one language (music) through another (language itself). Finally, that duality, apparently contradictory, may also be explained through the concept of attributed semantic by right, developed by Gyorg Lukács, in which, due the purely sound nature of music, that duality would be dissolved in the need of treating it, by right of its usage, at the same time as much from a formalist point of view as from a contentistic, from which meanings are given by attribution of senses that are beyond music itself, and which are necessary to aesthetic reflection on music.