Gebrauchsmusik

Gebrauchsmusik (German pronunciation: [ɡəˈbʁaʊ̯ksmuˌziːk]) is a German term, meaning "utility music", for music that exists not only for its own sake, but which was composed for some specific, identifiable purpose. This purpose can be a particular historical event, like a political rally or a military ceremony, or it can be more general, as with music written to accompany dance, or music written for amateurs or students to perform.

While composer Paul Hindemith is probably the figure most identified with this expression, it seems to have been coined within the realm of musicology rather than composition. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the modern academic discipline of musicology was formulated by a mainly German group of scholars who were interested not only in formal development and biographical data, but also to an extent in the sociopolitical position of music throughout history, and the relationship of music and musicians to society at large.

Perhaps the first such musicologist to use the word Gebrauchsmusik was Paul Nettl (), writing in 1921 ("Beiträge zur Geschichte der Tanzmusik im 17. Jahrhundert", Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, iv [1921–2], 257–65), who employed it in reference to half of his perceived binarism between that 17th-century dance music which was in fact danced to, and that which was written in dance forms but was actually abstract music intended only for listening (by extension, this duality applied to the dichotomy between any music for a specific purpose, Gebrauchsmusik, and that for none but the pleasure or edification of listening, Vortragsmusik).

Nettl arrived at this dual-development view of dance music through his observation that such pieces began, as the century progressed, to use stylistic and formal devices that were farther from the province of simple utility and more aligned with some anticipation of a listening audience paying full attention. The period's emerging binary dance form featured such characteristics as an increasing tonicization of foreign keys, an increasingly explicit and emphasized dominant-tonic tonal axis, and a refined delicacy of ornamentation, all of which would seem superfluous in application to a music intended only as the rhythmic accompaniment to physical activity. In addition to these developments in the individual movements, they were organized into ever more extended and stylized suites, which greatly resembled other instrumental forms of the day. Indeed, the mature sonata da camera is virtually indistinguishable from the dance suite of the time.

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