The most influential philosopher of music in the nineteenth century, and probably since, was by trade a music critic and journalist. As a philosopher and as a historian of music, in which latter capacity he was eventually awarded a more-or- less honorary professorship at the University of Vienna, Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) was a talented autodidact. This mixed profile has much to do with the signal success of his contribution to the philosophy of music. Unlike any professionally trained philosophers of his day or the professional musicians who sometimes thought to emulate them (such as Richard Wagner), Hanslick was able to ground his discussion of aesthetic principles in a solid, empirical understanding of the modern musical canon and to express his views on matters of genuine philosophical significance in terms immediately intelligible to laymen as well as professionals in either field.
Hanslick was born in Prague to German-speaking parents of musical, scholarly, and literary inclinations. His father Joseph Adolph Hanslik (as he spelled the name) was a pianist and singer who gave lessons as well as working in the university library. Above all he was an enthusiastic amateur scholar who taught for a time philosophy and aesthetics, edited a volume of Vorlesungen über Ästhetik by one Johann Heinrich Dambeck (Prague, 1822), and followed closely, too, the work of the empiricist philosopher Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798–1854). Hanslick’s mother, Caroline, was the daughter of a successful Jewish merchant, Salomon Abraham Kisch (she converted to Catholicism at the time of her marriage), who passed on to her son an enthusiasm for literature and the theater, as Hanslick recalls in his substantial memoir, Aus meinem Leben (1894). As a young man in Prague he was trained in music by the leading native composer of the era, Vaclav Jan Tomásek (or Wenzel Johann Tomascheck, 1774–1850), and became acquainted with such contemporaries as Robert Zimmermann (1824– 98) and August Wilhelm Ambros (1816–76), who later became notable figures in philosophy and music historiography, respectively. Like Beneke (the figure admired by Hanslick’s father), Zimmermann was a follower of the philosopher and psychological theorist Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) who, along with Immanuel Kant, is regarded as an important source of “formalist” aesthetics (Hanslick 1986: xv).
In the later 1840s, Hanslick started writing music criticism for various journals and newspapers in Prague and Vienna. In 1846 he published a lengthy, highly appreciative review of Wagner’s new opera, Tannhäuser, in the Wiener Allegemeine Musik-Zeitung, at a time when the composer (Hanslick’s notorious nemesis of later years) was as yet little known to the European public. A law degree from the University of Vienna in 1849 opened the way to a career in the Hapsburg bureaucracy, a typical livelihood for amateur scholars of the time, working first for the ministry of finance and later the ministry of education. Following his initial appointment as a part-time lecturer or Privatdozent in 1856, Hanslick was promoted to a professorship in “the history and aesthetics of music” at the University of Vienna in 1861. This enabled him to leave the civil service, although he derived his income principally from his work for the Neue freie Presse (of which he was a founding editor, in 1864, when it broke off from Die Presse). Hanslick continued to cover musical life in Vienna, with frequent journeys to other European capitals, up through the early years of the next century. His single text on matters of musical philosophy, which earned him his initial appointment at the university, was published in 1854, before he had turned thirty: Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music, or On the Musically Beautiful). It was the product of extensive reading in music history, aesthetics, and criticism conducted in spare time during his early years in Vienna and, before that, as a civil servant in Klagenfurt. Despite the widespread attention his short treatise continued to attract, he published nothing further, either in monograph or article form, devoted expressly to issues of philosophical aesthetics. As a historian Hanslick published only one study, his 1869 Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, a history of musical life and institutions in Vienna from the time of Haydn and Mozart to the present. His later publications were all collections of reviews and other journalism.) However, Hanslick did continue to revise and further annotate On the Musically Beautiful throughout ten subsequent editions that appeared in his lifetime. This concise essay is regarded as the first and most influential theory of absolute music and musical formalism.
The term “absolute music” occurs only once in On the Musically Beautiful, in Chapter 2, maintaining the necessity of grounding philosophical claims regarding the expressive capacity of music in the example of “pure instrumental music” (“for it alone is pure, absolute musical art”) (Hanslick 1990: vol. 1, 52). Nonetheless, it is fair to say that Hanslick’s book is, as much as anything, a theory of absolute music, to which virtually all subsequent arguments about the autonomy of musical form (or more simply, “formalism”) and about the expressive and semantic capacities or limitations of European tonal music must make some reference.
The remainder of this chapter offers a brief overview of the contents of On the Musically Beautiful, considers Hanslick’s role in the emergence of “absolute music” as a term and as a concept, evaluates his reputation as an advocate of formalism (and hence of musical analysis as the correct means of understanding music), and concludes with comments on his role as a critic with strongly historicist, but by no means antiquarian, tendencies.
Hanslick subtitled On the Musically Beautiful “a contribution toward the revision of the aesthetics of music.” The objective of this revision is explained in the brief foreword to the first edition: “it will be enough if I succeed in providing an effective battering ram against the decayed aesthetics of feeling, and at the same time some foundation stones for a new structure to be erected in its place” (Hanslick 1990: vol. 1, 9). For at least a hundred years, as long as there had been a philosophical discourse of aesthetics, the meaning and value of music had been equated with the “feelings” it was thought to express or represent. Eighteenth-century attempts to include music within a theory of the fine arts unified by a principle of imitation (Aristotelian mimesis) generally yielded or adapted to the alternative that music imitated, represented, or expressed not natural objects but subjective emotions (see Chapter 25, “The early modern period,” in this volume). Provoked by the ubiquity of this opinion and the endemic lack of rigor with which it was circulated, Hanslick set about to challenge it as the reigning assumption of musical aesthetics.
The first two chapters of On the Musically Beautiful (Hanslick 1986 – all page numbers in this section refer to this edition) are devoted to this so-called “negative thesis,” namely, that neither the subjective arousal of “feelings” (Gefühle) nor their objective representation constitutes the essential purpose, value, or “content” of music (xxiii). The first chapter, concerned with demonstrating the failings of the conventional “aesthetics of feeling,” is above all aimed at redirecting the attentions of aesthetic inquiry from the subjective response of the listener to the objective evidence of the musical composition. Although he acknowledges the origin of aesthetics as a philosophy or science of “sensations” (Empfind-ungen) analyzing the effects of the fine arts on a discriminating audience with reference to categories of taste and perception, Hanslick sees modern aesthetics as becoming re-oriented to models of the natural sciences (via, perhaps, the example of Herbart’s empiricist psychology). Progress in aesthetic thought will also depend, he asserts, on increased attention to the specifics of the individual medium, and be less concerned with supposedly common principles uniting all the arts. Imagination, as the faculty of aesthetic perception, is not merely disinterested, as Kant asserted, but also involves an active engagement with the object perceived, as “contemplating with active understanding” (4). Aesthetic understanding and judgments issuing from such active engagement will necessarily be grounded in knowledge of the nature and “rules” of the medium, and will focus more on the fixed constitution of the work than on the variable effects produced in the listening subject. An appendix to the first chapter catalogues representative examples of the doctrine of “music as an art of feelings” from Johann Mattheson through the 1840s (examples from Wagner’s writings were added only in the sixth edition, 1881; see 86–91).
The case against “feelings” is articulated more systematically in Chapter 2. The argument is not that feelings or emotions are irrelevant to the experience of music, but that they do not constitute its actual “content,” nor can they provide the basis for judging the artistic value or beauty of a musical work. (Up to this point Hanslick accepts the validity of a form-content dichotomy in the arts, as well as Hegel’s notion of art as the sensual appearance of the “idea.”) Because most of the “garden-variety emotions” (as Peter Kivy calls them; Kivy 1990, 2002) such as love, jealousy, anger, and the like require a defining object unavailable in a purely instrumental musical context, they cannot plausibly constitute a content to be represented by music, Hanslick argues. (He also distinguishes, along the way, between music’s ability to arouse feelings and the question of their representation per se.) Music’s alleged expressive or representational power is better understood in terms of the dynamic principles it is much more able to articulate: softness and loudness, consonance and dissonance, rising and falling contours, variations of speed, and so on. In this way music may provide a metaphorical exemplification of emotional properties, a system of “tone symbolism,” loosely defined (11). By way of confirming these claims, Hanslick comments on various examples of instrumental music (e.g. Beethoven’s overture to The Creatures of Prometheus) and operatic works as evidence of the generally fluid character of musical expression and its resistance to unequivocal, exclusive forms of signification.
Where Chapters 1 and 2 are concerned with discrediting the “decayed aesthetics of feeling,” Chapter 3 turns to the positive thesis, an account of the “beautiful” in music, from whence the book derives its title. As Geoffrey Payzant notes, the Leipzig publisher Rudolph Weigel may have imposed this main title on the book as a whole, which Hanslick had only thought to identify as his contribution “toward a revision of the aesthetics of music” (xii). Chapter 3 does indeed contain the essentials of a theory of “absolute music” for which the author is best remembered, whatever questions remain about his identification with that term as such (see Pederson 2009). Elevating the chapter title “The Beautiful in Music” or “The Musically Beautiful” (“Das Musikalisch-Schöne”) to the general title highlights a problem Hanslick faced in trying to construct a “positive thesis,” or even to lay the foundation stones of one upon the ruins of the now discredited aesthetics of feeling. Where Peter Kivy, in analyzing the negative thesis of Chapters 1 and 2, posed the heuristic question “What was Hanslick Denying?” (Kivy 1990), the remainder of the book, especially Chapter 3 and the final Chapter 7 (“The Concepts of ‘Content’ and ‘Form’ in Music”), might prompt the question, “What was Hanslick Asking?” At first that might seem to be: “What is the true content of music, or the nature of that content, if it is not feelings (neither their arousal nor their representation)?” But once the positive thesis is underway in Chapter 3, the question seems to turn in the direction of: “What is the nature of musical ‘beauty’?” and “Wherein resides the value of successful musical works?” The chapter suggests a set of equivalencies, without quite explicitly spelling them out as such: “Content = Beauty = Value.” More crucially, and somewhat more explicitly, Hanslick introduces another equivalence: “Content = Form.” These equivalences provide the foundation of his theory of absolute music and his aesthetic of musical formalism, as we would identify these today.
Subtending all of these equivalencies is a key phrase, “tönend bewegte Formen,” rendered by Geoffrey Payzant as “tonally moving forms” (29), although a more literal, if cumbersome, version might be “forms in sounding (musical) motion.” Such forms constitute the actual “content” of music. (The content of music is what you hear.) In the first edition these “sounding forms” are called “the unique content and object of music” (Hanslick 1990: vol. 1, 75). To convey the essentially abstract, formal nature of musical “beauty” or content Hanslick further advances the figure of the “arabesque,” translated into sounding form and “coming into being in continuous self-formation before our eyes,” or ears. Along the same lines he proposes the image of a kaleidoscope, similarly translated to a “higher sphere of ideality” (29). At pains not to compromise music’s status as a fine art, however, Hanslick emphasizes that, despite the abstract and seemingly decorative nature of these figures for musical form, the work of composition remains “a work of mind upon material compatible with the mind” (“ein Arbeiten des Geistes im geistfähigen Material”; 31; Hanslick 1990: vol. 1, 79). The remainder of the third chapter works through the implications of these claims and dismisses some of the critical fallacies engendered by traditional ways of viewing musical content. If content resided in “feelings,” for instance, the success of a composition would be proportionate to the accuracy or success with which those feelings were portrayed. Hanslick assumes no one truly believes that to be the case. The modern Romantic trend of looking for the “composer’s feelings” or life experiences encoded in the composition (as say, in the works of Beethoven) is also exposed as an untenable corollary of the old views.
Chapter 7 of On the Musically Beautiful, “The Concepts of ‘Form’ and ‘Content’ in Music,” revisits the form-content dichotomy as a kind of unfinished business, suggesting either that Hanslick himself was not entirely satisfied with the attempt to collapse it in Chapter 3, or that he was not confident that his audience was prepared to accept that move. In addition to the basic term “content” (Inhalt), he scrutinizes several related categories: object (Gegenstand), material (Stoff), and substance (Gehalt), of which the last comes closest to conveying the kind of medium-specific, form-immanent content described in Chapter 3. In particular, he revisits the question of whether music, without text, is capable of conveying a representational content in the manner of poetry or painting, such as the punishment of Orestes by the Furies or William Tell’s rebellious defiance of political authority. Not surprisingly, he answers in the negative: music “reiterates no subject matter already known and given a name; therefore it has no nameable content for our thinking in concepts” (80). The growing popularity of associating just these kinds of content with music in the form of “programmatic” concert overtures or tone poems probably explains why he felt it necessary to revisit this aspect of the “content” question at all. Elsewhere Hanslick provided the tools for constructing an alternative theory, whereby music might represent the underlying mythic or narrative archetypes of these stories in terms of analogous “dynamic principles” and contours; yet he does not consider that alternative in Chapter 7. Instead, he concludes with a provisional theory of “melodic content.” In Chapter 3 “rhythm” had been proposed as the basis of a hierarchical theory of temporal form (seen as “large-scale rhythm” breaking down into sections, periods, phrases). Now in Chapter 7 melodic themes or motives are proposed as the basis for a purely musical kind of content, reminiscent of the figure of “invention” borrowed from rhetoric in earlier eras. Hanslick likens themes to the principal characters in a novel (82), reflecting an awareness and acceptance of narrative paradigms increasingly common in nineteenth-century musical thought. But he reiterates his belief that content, as “spiritual substance,” is immanent, autonomous, and not representational.
The intervening Chapters 4 through 6 of On the Musically Beautiful analyze aspects of the receptive role of the listener (Chapter 4, “Analysis of the Subjective Impression of Music,” Chapter 5, “Musical Perception: Aesthetic vs. Pathological”) and the question of how the materials of music, either as a system of tone-relations or as individual composition, relate to materials or prototypes of the natural world (Chapter 6, “The Relation of Music to Nature”). Thus Chapters 4 and 5 continue to work through the whole matter of music and “feelings,” further stressing the importance of disinterested, objective contemplation of the aesthetic object as “form,” on the model of Kantian aesthetics. Chapter 4, in which Hanslick’s grounding in early theories of psychology is most in evidence, locates an alternative agency for the expression of feelings in the role of the performer. Though only briefly developed, the remarks here on the activity of the performer, as mind and body, and on performance as acoustic “presence” (vs. the disembodied state of the work as text) anticipate a variety of critical turns in recent musicological writing (for example Abbate 2004 or LeGuin 2006). Chapter 5 casts a skeptical eye on the classical tradition of musical “ethos” as a primitive if not downright superstitious relic of a culture still unacquainted with notions of composition as musical artwork. In asserting the lack of any plausible prototypes for music in nature (whether for scales and harmonies or for the composition of musical works), Chapter 6 also considers the relation of music to language. Viewed as modes of communication or utterance, neither music nor language has any explicit prototype in nature (70–1). But whereas poetry does, like painting, transform objects given in nature by way of its “content” (the content of communication or utterance), the same does not apply to music. This is yet another reason for the fundamental autonomy of music as an art, regardless of what extra-musical combinations or uses it may be subjected to.
In a recent essay surveying the critical history of the term “absolute music,” Sanna Pederson reminds us that Hanslick did not himself employ the phrase in any direct or self-conscious way (Pederson 2009: 250–5). It is also worth adding that in the single instance where he did approximate the phrase, speaking of instrumental music as the “pure, absolute” genre of “musical art” (“reine, absolute Tonkunst”; Hanslick 1990: vol. 1, 52), he was making a clinical or empirical distinction, not a value judgment. Like E.T.A. Hoffmann before him, Hanslick stresses here that any claims about music’s capacity to express feelings or represent content must be tested on examples of music without verbal text, for self-evident reasons. “Absolute” here is a synonym and perhaps mild intensifier of the adjective “pure” (granted, not a neutral or value-free term), which is otherwise the standard way of distinguishing instrumental from vocal or programmatic music for Hanslick as for the preceding generation. It also seems clear that Hanslick is not making any conscious reference to Wagner’s extensive use of the phrase “absolute music” in the latter’s writings from 1849 to 1851, where it is used with negative polemical import, though ultimately synonymous with Hanslick’s usage (cf. Pederson 2009: 253). In neither case is the term infused with the idealist, Hegelian sense of the “absolute” as a quality of the infinite or transcendental, even if both Wagner and Hanslick understood music’s potential claims to traffic with some such higher realm. (Hanslick’s efforts to purge the remnants of Hegelian idealism from later editions of his book are well known; see Dahlhaus 1989: 27–9; Bonds 1997: 43–20; Hanslick 1990: vol. 2, 88–114).
All the same, as I have suggested, On the Musically Beautiful can certainly be read as a theory of what we have come to call absolute music, most explicitly in the effort to construct a “positive thesis” about the nature of musical form as content in Chapter 3. If Hanslick’s use of the adjectives “pure” or “absolute” may be more or less neutrally descriptive but another phrase, “the specifically musical,” is used throughout the book with clear polemical intent. This phrase was also notably taken up in the debates over Hanslick’s text and the claims of the “New German School” around Wagner and Liszt over the following decades. Reiterating in Chapter 5 earlier claims about the essential identity of form and content, for instance, Hanslick writes:
Precisely the “specifically musical” part [of a composition] is the creation of the artistic spirit, with which the contemplating spirit unites in complete understanding. The ideal content of the composition is in these concrete tonal structures, not in the vague general impression of an abstract feeling. The form (as tonal structure), as opposed to the feeling (as would-be content), is precisely the real content of the music, is the music itself, while the feeling produced can be called neither content nor form, but actual effect.
(1986: 60)
Insofar as Hanslick insisted that claims about expressive content, beauty, or aesthetic value in music had to be relatable to the empirical data of the work as sounding form (tönend bewegte Formen), it is reasonable to identify him with an aesthetics of musical “formalism.” The “revision of the aesthetics of music” to which he contributed can indeed be described as a turn from an older aesthetics of content (Inhaltsästhetik, as German scholarship has traditionally labeled it) toward one oriented to form. But while the modern discipline of “formalist” musical analysis can legitimately invoke Hanslick’s ideas as a philosophical foundation, it seems unlikely that Hanslick himself had any notion of such an edifice to be built upon those “foundation stones” he thought to be providing, once having cleared away the debris of the “decayed aesthetics of feeling.” German music theorists such as A.B. Marx, Gottfried Weber, Siegfried Dehn, Moritz Hauptmann, and Hugo Riemann had provided tools for a discipline of analysis (especially harmonic) during Hanslick’s lifetime, but he seems to have paid scant attention either to the theory or to its potential analytical application. Committed as he was to his principal lifelong vocation of journalistic music criticism, and secondarily to lecturing on music history and appreciation, it is highly unlikely that he would have viewed a specialized discourse of musical analysis as a satisfactory means of articulating “the beautiful in music.” (See, for example, his remarks on “dry technical definitions” as the unsatisfactory alternative to metaphorical discourse (1986: 30)).
In his memoir Aus meinem Leben, published in 1894, a year before he retired from full-time service as music editor of the Neue freie Presse, Hanslick reflected on his original intention to follow up On the Musically Beautiful with a fully fledged treatise on the aesthetics of music, to which the earlier publication would have been merely the prolegomenon. “I was well aware,” he admits, “that its polemic, negative aspects far outweighed the positive, systematic aspects in scope and acuity” (Hanslick 1987: 153). But by the time his career change from civil servant to university professor allowed more ample opportunity for such a project, in the early 1860s, he found himself becoming disillusioned about the prospects. In part, his activity as a critic and now as a historian began to persuade him of the impossibility of constructing a single valid aesthetic discourse of “music,” in view of the infinite contingencies of history, culture, and taste (see also Karnes 2008: 48–75).
At first blush this gesture of cultural relativism may sound unlikely. The scattered references to folk, popular, and especially non-European musics in On the Musically Beautiful seem to echo all the expected biases of a mid-nineteenth-century Viennese music “professional.” And throughout his life Hanslick made no secret of his predilection for the Classical and Romantic canon, viewing even Bach and Handel with a certain skepticism, let alone any “ancient music” preceding the high Baroque. Yet his confession is congruent with the positivist, empiricist, and materialist strains of thought evident in much of On the Musically Beautiful. While, as Mark Evan Bonds (1997) has argued, Hanslick’s arguments about musical autonomy and the immanence of value and “meaning” in form are to a certain extent predicated on the intellectual legacy of German idealism, the more strictly formalist implications of these arguments are incompatible with the idealist tradition. (Not only did he erase the more overtly “idealist” strains from subsequent edition of On the Musically Beautiful, but a majority of later insertions concern perspectives offered by different historical repertoires.) Given Hanslick’s commitments to empirical psychology and cultural history, he could not claim a single, fixed, quantifiable measure of “beauty” for any configuration of “forms in sounding motion.” Rather, that measure must vary according to the constitution of the listener no less than the time, place, and quality of the performance, among any number of factors. If value, meaning, and the perception of beauty – or for that matter, feelings – all had to be referable to the “music itself,” for Hanslick, the autonomy of any music was of a limited and highly contingent sort, as his unwritten “supplement” to On the Musically Beautiful would, it seems, have gone on to emphasize.
See also Analysis (Chapter 48), Kant (Chapter 30), Music’s arousal of emotions (Chapter 22), Nietzsche (Chapter 32), Psychology of music (Chapter 55), and Wagner (Chapter 35).
Abbate, C. (2004) “Music, Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30: 505–36.
Bonds, M.E. (1997) “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50: 387–420.
Dahlhaus, C. (1989) The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. R. Lustig, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Hanslick, E. (1986 [1891 8th edn]) On the Musically Beautiful, trans. G. Payzant, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
—— (1987 [1894]) Aus meinem Leben, ed. P. Wapnewski, Kassel: Bärenreiter.
—— (1990 [1854]) Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 2 vols, ed. D. Strauss, Mainz: Schott.
Karnes, K.C. (2008) Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kivy, P. (1990) “What was Hanslick Denying?” Journal of Musicology 8: 3–18.
—— (2002) Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Le Guin, E. (2006) Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pederson, S. (2009) “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically,” Music & Letters 90: 240–62.
Abegg, W. (1974) Musikästhetik und Musikkritik bei Eduard Hanslick, Regensburg: Bosse. (The first scholarly evaluation of Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise in light of his music criticism.)
Bujic, B. (1988) Music in European Thought, 1851–1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An anthology of source readings in translation, including an alternative translation by Martin Cooper of chs 1, 3, and 7 of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen.)
Burford, M. (2006) “Hanslick’s Idealist Materialism,” 19th-Century Music 30: 166–81. (Following Bonds 1997, argues that On the Musically Beautiful sought a middle way between older idealist traditions of philosophical aesthetics and a modern “materialism” foregrounding the concrete empirical data of the artwork and the specificity of medium.)
Chua, D.K.L. (1999) Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Broadly deconstructive essays on a range of categories related to the concept of absolute music, including a brief discussion of Hanslick.)
Gay, P. (1978) “For Beckmesser,” in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 257–77. (An appreciative re-assessment of Hanslick’s role as a writer on music and a spokesperson for the educated middle class in late Hapsburg Austria.)
Hanslick, E. (1950) Vienna’s Golden Years of Music 1850–1900: Eduard Hanslick, ed. and trans. H. Pleasants, New York: Simon and Schuster; reprinted as (1988) Hanslick’s Music Criticisms, New York: Dover. (A lightly annotated collection of Hanslick’s music criticism. Still the only such selection available in English translation.)
—— (1993–) Sämtliche Schriften: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. D. Strauss, Vienna and Weimar: Böhlau-Verlag. (A collected critical edition of Hanslick’s music journalism, with notes and scholarly essays; six volumes to date, covering 1844 to 1863.)
Karnes, K.C. (2008) Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapters 1 and 2 explore Hanslick’s relationship to the emerging discipline of musicology at the University of Vienna in the latter half of the nineteenth century.)
Kivy, P. (1990) Music Alone: Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (As per the subtitle, essays not so much on Hanslick’s ideas as such, but on their implications for the experience of listening to and understanding music.)
Landerer, C. (2002) “Nietzsches Vorstudien zur Geburt der Tragödie in ihrer Beziehung zur Musikästhetik Eduard Hanslicks,” Nietzsche-Studien 31: 113–33. (Hanslick’s ideas on absolute music and his anti-Wagnerian critical bias are explored as early seeds of Nietzsche’s later turn against the composer, already germinating at the time of The Birth of Tragedy.)
Maus, F.E. (1992) “Hanslick’s Animism,” Journal of Musicology 10: 273–92. (Points to the prevalence of organic, bodily, and even ambivalently erotic discourse in On the Musically Beautiful, encouraging modern critics and aestheticians to pursue such aspects as remained partially latent in Hanslick’s thinking.)
McColl, S. (1996) Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–97: Critically Moving Forms, New York: Oxford University Press. (Looks at a little over one year in the musical life of the Austrian capital through the lens of musical journalism toward the end of Hanslick’s career.)
Payzant, G. (1981) “Hanslick, Sams, Gay, and ‘tönend bewegte Formen’,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40: 41–8. (Argues for the rendition of this key phrase as translated in Hanslick 1986 as “tonally moving forms,” emphasizing, in Payzant’s view, Classical– Romantic tonality as the essential context of Hanslick’s thought.)
—— (2003) Hanslick on the Musically Beautiful: Sixteen Lectures on the Musical Aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick, Christchurch: Cybereditions. (Payzant’s lectures explore various aspects of On the Musically Beautiful.)
Taruskin, R. (1998) “A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and ‘the Music Itself’,” in Defining Russia Musically, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 360–88. (Distinguishes a twentieth-century brand of musical formalism from nineteenth-century ideas of absolute music still beholden to idealist philosophical traditions.)
Yanal, R.J. (2006) “Hanslick’s Third Thesis,” British Journal of Aesthetics 46: 259–66. (A close reading of Hanslick’s arguments for distinguishing musical beauty from its expressive properties.)
Zangwill, N. (2004) “Against Emotion: Hanslick Was Right About Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 44: 29–43. (Reviews and defends Hanslick’s primary arguments for the so-called “negative thesis.”)