Kant's Musical Antiformalism

Abstract

According to the orthodox view of Kant's philosophy of music, Kant is the founder of musical formalism, the view that music is pure, contentless form, and appreciated as such. On this orthodox view, Kant is an innovator in philosophy of music, though his views are confused and sometimes contradictory. Sometimes, we are told, Kant indicates that music is a fine art and sometimes that it is merely an agreeable art. None of the orthodox position is correct. Kant's views on music are familiar, even a little old fashioned for their time. His views are consistent. He believes that some music is fine art and that the fine arts are imitative arts. Imitative arts have content, and Kant believes that at least some music has content. Our views on Kant's philosophy of music ought to be thoroughly revised.

Questioning the formalist facet of Kant's approach to music - an application to Mussorgsky, a comparison with Hanslick and a response to Samantha Matherne

“…In fact, although some commentators consider Kant to be one of the founding fathers of musical formalism (e.g. Dahlhaus, 1967;Eaton, 2004;Schueller, 1955), the idea that Kant is not a musical formalist in a proper and robust sense, despite some (really or apparently) formalist aspects of his theory, has recently been defended by authors such as Young (2020) or Mulherin (2016).…”