Music, Culture and Society: David Roberts
6 March 2008
Reflections on Cultural Secularization
David Roberts
The paper reads the theme of the conference against the grain: instead of treating music as an integral part of modern culture, I want to examine the conception - prevalent since the Romantics - of music as standing apart from the other arts through its power as absolute music to express the infinite (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and mirror the universe (Schelling), that is, music’s power to be an aesthetic substitute for religion and philosophy.
The cultural secularization of the arts is examined with reference to Adolf Behne’s essay, Rebirth of Architecture and Hegel. The counter-movement against secularization is examined by reference to Proust and Wagner’s late essay, Religion and Art. In conclusion, I argue that cultural secularization is better understood as a dialectic of desacralization and resacralization, illustrated by a brief look at the ongoing significance of religious music in the twentieth century.
David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German, Monash University, a former director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of the social theory journal Thesis Eleven.