Conference Theme 2: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Brahms’s broad intellectual curiosity was often concerned with philosophical issues. From an early age and throughout his life he read widely and kept a log of proverbs and philosophical sayings that were significant to him. His library testifies to an enduring interest in philosophical matters. Along with the volumes of Herder, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche that he read and annotated were anthologies of philosophy such as Friederike Kempner’s volumes, the first of which (1883) contains excerpts of Kant, Locke, Cartesius, Friedrich the Great, Marcus Aurelius, and Rousseau, and the second (1886), passages from Plato, Leibniz, Wolf, Cicero, amongst others. Brahms drew much of his philosophy from literature, the Bible being a prime example. In his setting of secular texts, he sought out the same difficult questions as in his secular works in order to “legitimize” them. Yet his philosophical interests were by no means limited to these areas.
Both in his lifetime and following Brahms’s death, the writings of musical figures such as Heinrich Schenker, Hugo Riemann, Ernst Kurth, and of cultural figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch have influenced how we have come to see and understand Brahms in the fields of music theory, music analysis, and critical theory. Tracing the different lineages of these figures helps us to understand how Brahms and Modernism interacted in the twentieth century. This conference will explore the nature, range, and scope of Modernism as a movement in relation to Brahms. It will explore the extent to which Marxist theory exerted an influence on judgments of taste in Brahms’s music. It will further widen its scope to consider how music analysis and critical theory interact in Lacanian, Badiouian, and Žižekian readings of Brahms.
