Music and philosophical puzzles

Notes, 2000

Music and Letters, 2009

Theoria

Part 1 of this two-part essay challenges the lackadaisical post-structuralist assumption, common in musicology, that absolute music is "indefinable." It does so by contending that music counts as absolute just in case it is proper for it to be subjected to absolutistic explanation. In advancing this argument, Part 1 gives an account of the social practice of "making music absolute." Part 1 concludes by demonstrating that there are multiple, contestable norms that might be held to govern whether, when, why, and how it is appropriate to engage in this practice.

2017

I would like to thank the following people for invaluable help and support during the work with this thesis. First and foremost, thank you to my supervisor, Professor Steffen Borge, who has provided excellent feedback with equal amounts of wit and insight. Second, I would like to thank everyone who participated in, and organized the master colloquium. The discussions there have always been stimulating, and it has provided me with valuable evaluation in many stages of this text. Third, thanks to everyone who has read parts of or the whole of my thesis, and commented on it. To Morten Wasrud for comments on Kant and Ridley. And, especially to Ellen Berg Larsen and Rolf Inge Larsen, who in addition to being my loving parents, are also excellent readers of academic texts. For help with keeping the musical perspective, I would like to thank Senior Lecturer Bjarne Isaksen at The Music Conservatory in Tromsø, and also Professor Øivind Varkøy at NMH who took the time to read my project description and give me some helpful pointers. Thanks also go out to friends and family who have had the patience to discuss with me (or sometimes just listen to me discuss with myself

Journal of the Royal Musical Association , 2016

2020

“Absolute music” names an idea, an aesthetic concept, a regulative construct, a repertoire, and an aspiration. The term also engages a range of broader claims about aesthetic autonomy, or the possibility of aesthetic experience more generally. This chapter investigates how and why the aspiration towards autonomy has seemed so necessary—and so powerfully subversive—for musical thinkers at certain times in history. It traces the entanglements and misalignments of the various meanings and uses of these ideas, and brings these insights into the remit of contemporary debates about music’s ineffability, and its capacity to facilitate resistance and political agency.

2018

It is a common assumption that Hanslick was the main spokesperson for "absolute music." My research shows that Hanslick did not come to be associated with the term until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Around 1880, polemics about Liszt's concept of program music used "absolute music" to designate program music's opposite. But just as absolute music was becoming firmly linked to Hanslick, Brahms, and Dvorák around 1900, Wagnerian writers hijacked the term to refer to Bruckner.

Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2014