Search

Until now the exchange between Eduard Hanslick and August Wilhelm Ambros has been interpreted mainly in connection with their writings on musical aesthetics from the 1850s. However, sources recently during preparations for a historical-critical edition of Ambros's Vienna essays on music and music reviews indicate that the dialogue between these two music critics and aestheticians continued intensively still in the 1870s, when both were active in Vienna. The present study is focused on this final Viennese period. It turns out that the same aestheticians whose writings in the 1850s provoked the conflict between advocates of aesthetics stressing form and stressing content contributed substantially, through their later exchange in Vienna, to a softening of the controversy.

Not many years ago, I gave a keynote at the SPEEC Conference at Oxford University entitled, 'music Technology, Music technology or Music Technology?' (Contemporary Music Review. 32/5: 459–471, 2013) and have continued to investigate the subjects that arose in that talk both as a scholar and as a composer, issues that align strongly with many themes included in this conference's Call for Papers. Suffice to say that some tension was discovered between the two words in that discussion. This conference's food for thought keynote talk (modified in the form of the current article) focuses on questions including: Where do we stand in terms of art for art's sake in today's world? How has this influenced our understanding of what aesthetics currently signifies? Who are our communities of listeners? And, with this in mind, what roles do or should communication and dramaturgy play in terms of music making? In consequence are the tensions between the words music and technology in any way getting resolved? As fellow keynote speaker, John Richards1 and I are currently involved with writing a book dealing with many of these very issues, one of the book's themes, sampling culture, will be used as this article's case study.