The History of Music as Affirmative Culture. Music Variations about Herbert Marcuse

Authors

  • Martín Eckmeyer Instituto de Investigación en Producción y Enseñanza del Arte Argentino y Latinoamericano. Facultad de Bellas Artes. Universidad Nacional de La Plata | Facultad de Humanidades, Artes y Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24215/24691488e018

Keywords:

Musical historiography, affirmative culture, musical autonomy, aesthetic idealism, ethnocentrism

Abstract

In the 1937 essay The Affirmative Character of Culture, Herbert Marcuse introduces a critique of what he understands is a function of culture and art: the legitimization of the existing social order. Reversing the Marxist orthodoxy that makes culture a reflection of infrastructure, Marcuse thinks that culture can produce the conditions for the reproduction of inequalities. Quite contrary to the imaginary about high art, thinking about music as a universal expression of the absolute and immanent form can, rather than oppose, reaffirm and validate the alienated disparity of the bourgeois capitalist world. In this text we will try to draw some relationships between the Marcusian formulation on the affirmative culture, and the possible role of the hegemonic musical historiography in the acceptance of the existing.

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References

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Published

2019-05-30

How to Cite

Eckmeyer, M. (2019). The History of Music as Affirmative Culture. Music Variations about Herbert Marcuse. Arte E Investigación, (15), e018. https://doi.org/10.24215/24691488e018

Issue

No. 15 (2019): Arte e Investigación 15

Section

Articles

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