Arti musices, Vol. 40 No. 1-2, 2009.
Original scientific paper
Josip and His Work Uvod u glasbenu estetiku (Introduction to the Aesthetics of Music, Zagreb 1944)
Stanislav Tuksar
orcid.org/0000-0002-7171-2801
; Muzička akademija, Odsjek za muzikologiju, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
This article offers an elementary analysis and evaluation of the work Uvod u glasbenu estetiku (Introduction to the Aesthetics of Music) by Josip Andreis, published in Zagreb in 1944. It is a short book of about one hundred pages, consisting of eight chapters dealing with the approach to the aesthetics of music, tone, rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, form, the relationship between tone and word, and the experience of a music work. Although entitled as an Introduction, this work is in fact, chronologically, the first modern consistent aesthetics of music written by a Croatian author. The sources of Andreis’s general and aesthetical views are definitely to be found in the great intellectual streamings from the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries (classical German idealism, German late-Romantic aesthetics of music, the French musicological school from the beginning of the 20th century), while historicism, formalism, positivist scientism and speculative aesthetics were left aside. In this, special influence by authors such as Karl Grunsky, Jules Combarieu, Hugo Riemann and William Wolf has been established. On the other hand, Andreis manifested an outstanding urge for occasional Romanticised idealisations, obviously closely connected with his personal religious ethics and inclination to literary poeticism. However, the socio-political climate in Croatia after 1945, with its substantially contrary Marxist ideological orientation, pushed Andreis’s aesthetics of music to the social and intellectual margins, and into almost complete oblivion.
It has been stated that Andreis clearly formed his musico-aesthetical attitudes before writing his general and national histories of music (published in several editions between 1942 and 1982). Thus, they could not be analysed and completely understood without detailed knowledge and the interaction of these two areas (aesthetics and history of music). Consequently, as a continuation of this article, it would be highly recommendable – for the sake of scholarly-historiographical objectivity in research of Croatian aesthetical, historiographical and musico-theoretical 20th century thought on music - to undertake an all-encompassing study under a working title "Josip Andreis - His Aesthetics of Music in Itself and as Applied to His Histories of Music".
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
47623
URI
Publication date:
20.11.2009.
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