Formalism (music)

In music theory and especially in the branch of study called the aesthetics of music, formalism is the concept that a composition's meaning is entirely determined by its form.

Leonard B. Meyer, in Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), distinguished "formalists" from what he called "expressionists": "...formalists would contend that the meaning of music lies in the perception and understanding of the musical relationships set forth in the work of art and that meaning in music is primarily intellectual, while the expressionist would argue that these same relationships are in some sense capable of exciting feelings and emotions in the listener" (Meyer 1956, p. 3). (The term "expressionism" is also used to define a musical genre typified by the early works of Schoenberg. The two terms are not necessarily related.) Meyer applied the term formalist (p. 3) to Eduard Hanslick who, in his later years, championed the music of Brahms over that of Liszt and Wagner because of the clear formal principles (drawn from Beethoven's music) that he found in Brahms's music as opposed to the attempts at emotional expression and pictorial depiction (drawn from Berlioz's music) that he found in the music of Liszt and Wagner. Meyer also applied the term to Igor Stravinsky, though Stravinsky avoided applying the term to himself in the same sense. His Poétique musicale of 1942 (translated in 1947 as Poetics of Music) explores "The phenomenon of music" (title of chapter 2) from a formalist perspective. The book is the transcript of a series of lectures Stravinsky gave at Harvard University as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1939-40.

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