Classical Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Western Music

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This research project aims, with a relativization of modern view of music as the ultimate object, to throw a fresh light upon the thought in which music was incorporated into the category 'art', from a hitherto neglected angle of 'classical tradition'. The issue is formulated into four topics :1. What is 'classical tradition' in Western music?2. What is the nature of Aristotle's mimesis which provided a framework for the modern conception of art?3. How did eighteenth-century thinkers (mis-) interpret this concept?4. In which way were the classical tradition within the realm of music and the general thought on art inherited from antiquity incarnated in the eighteenth -century activities of music?Following this order, our research results are summarized below.1. Our concept of 'music' has remained intensionally and extensionally the same as Greek mousike of the fourth century B.C.Western Music also owes to the Greeks its digital definition of pitch and duration of sounds and the concept 'composition' as a consequence of this. While ancient music did not inspire later creation through remnant specimens, its image gathered from indirect evidences did lead modern musical practice.2. Mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics is more concerned with truth than beauty intuited through senses, in that it unveils a truer aspect of an object represehted. The much-disputed notion of catharsis should be interpreted as liberation from ignorance by means of recognizing a truth.3. Ch.Batterux in the mid-eighteenth century understood Aristotelian mimesis exclusively in relation to beauty, thus contributing to establishing art as 'beaux arts'. This view, biased as it appears to us, reflects the modern aisthetic notion of art.4. The results concerning this point should be reserved for a later report, because our research is still in progress.