Historical Formalism in Music: Toward a Philosophical Theory of Musical Form

Abstract

In this paper I begin to fashion a theory of musical form that I call historical formalism. Historical formalism posits that our perception of the formal properties of a musical work is informed by considerations not only of artistic categories but also of the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural circumstances within which that work was composed.

Keywords

• artistic perception
• categories of art
• contextualism
• formalism
• Kivy
• Levinson
• musical form