Carl Dahlhaus and the music-aesthetical legacy of the Beethoven-Hegelian tradition

• Grant number: 19/27194-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: April 01, 2021
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marco Aurélio Werle
• Grantee: Reginaldo Rodrigues Raposo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/12666-2 - Carl Dahlhaus and the music-aesthetical legacy of the Beethoven-Hegelian tradition, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The research consists in investigating the historical-interpretative proposal of the 20th century german musicologist, Carl Dahlhaus' (1928-1989), on some of his texts about the musical forms development since the beginning of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th, according to the perspective of a "Beethoven-Hegelian tradition" pointed out and described by the american musicologist Janet Schmalfeldt, who takes him not only as the "foremost preserver" of this tradition, but also as "the readiest to substantiate his views by offering concrete analytic observations". Unlike Schmalfeldt's more specifically musicological, analytical-musical approach, however, this work will seek to identify the contours of the development in its aesthetical-musical side - where Beethoven's music is central as an object to the establishment of the debate on musical form, and where the appropriation of concepts, methods and contents of idealism by the same debate also becomes inevitable from a determined moment in time. From these contours, in turn, we will see how Dahlhaus also reports himself to this legacy, mainly by identifying in some contributions, selected according to explicit criteria, more emphatically the sense of developments of a dialectical-processual character, transferring to them the weight of a tradition in which he would also be inserted by seeking to systematize it in its own way, or at least by indicating historical-systematic meanings in it. At the same time, this implies opposing, as a question for musicology, Dahlhaus's historical-conceptual approach to other readings throughout the 20th century, indebted to this tradition, according to Schmalfeldt, only more inclined, in short, to the musical matter as an engine of conceptual development, in order to highlight methodological, interpretative divergencies, and particularities. (AU)