The historicity of music, between regimes and scenes

The theoretical and methodological application of Jacques Rancière’s thought to the historical study of music

Abstract

This article intends to introduce the theme of the historicity of music, starting from a theoretical-methodological approach based on aspects of the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The debate established by the author about the three regimes of identification of art – ethical, representative and aesthetical – as a way of thinking and demonstrating the historicity of literature and cinema, for example, can be applied to the analysis of the historicity of music. As we can deduct from the French author’s work, the main aspect to be considered for the historicity of a musical expression is not the “time”, “era” or “society” to which a musical expression would belong – using the “context” as a general basis to identify its historical specificity – but rather, the rationality present in the way in which the main elements of a musical expression are identified. In this rationality, the principles used in the interpretation are fundamental and, in turn, they lead to a historicity that conceives time/space not as a determining factor of a historical event, but the convergence of multiple temporalities in coexistence as its main characteristic, understanding the historicity of music out of static historical blocks. Throughout the article, brief examples of how the three regimes can be identified in broad debates regarding the historicity of music will be demonstrated and, at the end, a scene will be build, in order to perceive in an initially singular event – E.T.A. Hoffmann’s and Adolf Bernhard Marx’s critiques about Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphony, respectively – the confrontation of two regimes of historicity in art.