“Værk” og “liv” som (modstridende?)

musikvidenskabelige grundlag

Abstract

‘Work’ and ‘Life’ as (Contradictory?) Musicological Fundamentals
In this paper, the two words emphasized in the title, (art)work and life are not to be understood in their usual meaning as basic concepts in the literary genre of the bio/ monography. Instead, they stand as a designation of two fundamental attitudes to the theory and practise of musicology in general. For some time, the traditionally dominant concentration of musicology on the interpretation of musical artifacts seems to have been challenged more and more by various alternative approaches which are defined by a fundamental concept of music's social context. This, however, is not without problematic implications for aesthetic studies, including musicology, provided that the art work, the main category of aesthetics since the late 18th century, still deserves to retain its privileged position in relation to a general aisthesis, the faculty of sensing, resulting in characteristics such as aesthetic reactions or strategies, discussions of tastes and, ultimately, designations of life-styles emanating from such conditions.
The contribution of this lecture is to be read as a declaration of a scholarly programme. Its subjective character is in some way determined by a foreign author's
(self-imposed) task of articulating his impression of the rather strong opposing paradigms active in the Swedish musicology of today. At the same time, however, an
objectively aspiring distinction is aimed at, by specifying an ontology of the human
arts in comparison with its counterpart, a metaphysics of the social sciences. And in
the face of musicology with its generally uncontested and secured place within the
Humanities, some arguments are given for an option of the superiority of the discursive (humanistic) metaphysics rather than the ontological, fact-based metaphysics of
the social sciences. What is meant thereby are qualities like: penetration, stringency,
immanent discussion, openness, and a stressing of the never fully achieved goal of
the aesthetic investigation.