Richard Taruskin: Is There a Baby in the Bathwater?

(Part I)

As the single musicologist asked to participate in the 2005-6 lecture series “Aesthetische Autonomie?” at the Freie Universität Berlin, I took as my theme the remarkable transformation of the notion, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from a prime factor in the flowering of the high arts into a threat to their continued viability. First, the history of the term is considered and four interpretations of the word autonomy are offered: as that of aesthetics within philosophy, that of art as a human activity, that of music among the arts (and musicians among artists), and that of human beings as vouchsafed and embodied in (and through) the practice of art. I trace the origins of the bare notion of aesthetic autonomy for music to the sixteenth century, but its origin as a regulative concept to the beginning of the nineteenth. Then comes a litany of the ill effects that an insufficiently-reflected-upon allegiance to the notion has wrought for the practice of art music in the twentieth century, as manifested in composition, performance, criticism, and historiography. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of Adorno’s assertion of aesthetic autonomy as political and social resistance.

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