3 - “Form in music”

Summary

Marx wrote the essay “Form in music” for a three-volume collection of essays purporting to present the latest findings of the natural and human sciences to an educated public. Contributors included scholars, artists, and various specialists; the entire collection was assembled and edited by Julius Andreas Romberg, whose own specialty was the history of architecture. Marx's essay was a rare opportunity to discuss musical form outside the context of his compositional method. The result is a presentation of his doctrine of musical form in which he gives full range to the kind of philosophical overtones that he can only suggest within the limits of his treatise. Here is Marx at his most blatantly Idealist: musical form is described in consuming detail as artistic reason coming to know itself through sensuous concretion.

I offer this essay in its complete form; as such it stands as the only unabridged selection in this volume. Here the reader can get an unhindered impression of Marx's writing, for neither I nor Romberg have sacrificed any of his native verbosity, any of the unregulated profusion of rhetorical questions, pseudo-historical asides, bombast, and condescension that no doubt contributed to the impression he invariably made as a brilliant conversationalist. But while Marx will not be remembered as a purveyor of elegantly honed prose, his essay is doubtless a sturdy example of the type of thing one could expect from a nineteenth-century university lecturer who believed he was onto something important.