Musikalischer Fortschritt und der Weltkrieg der Nationalkulturen
Musical Progress and the World War of National Cultures

Summary/Abstract: The idea of music as a progressive force cannot be separated from its complete reorientation with the formation of bourgeois society since the eighteenth century. This “project of modernity” for the “self-assurance” and “self-founding” of man, which Jürgen Habermas intended to rescue as unfinished in 1980, stood out from the Enlightenment under the premises of secularization, the belief in progress, rationality and autonomy. The belief in progress has played a particularly important role in the world picture of Western modernity and influenced the history of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Compared to the notion of a “world literacy”, regional culture fell to a provincial phenomenon, which did not seem worthy of the attention of advanced, educated, higher spirits. The negative consequences of this attitude are seldom addressed, especially the spiritual world war of the national music cultures, which still rages to this day. It makes use of theoretical and aesthetic constructions which draw their claim to validity from an “emphatic art science”.

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