Music as Capitalist Icon

Abstract

This paper criticizes interpreters who appeal to structural homologies in making claims about the meaning of (classical instrumental) music. Such appeals are prevalent in Marxist and post-Marxist musical aesthetics, where structural correspondences between music and society are accorded great significance, and their prevalence can be traced to Adorno’s use of (what this paper calls) “semantically ambitious homologies,” which can be traced to Freud’s use of them. I lay out this genealogy and argue that homology-based musical semantics, as it has been customarily practiced, is a nonstarter.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Publication Date

11-13-2024

Publication Title

The Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism

Department

Music Theory

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpae039

Language

English

Format

text

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