In comparison with other arts, the independence of miusic as an expressive language was achieved quite late, because the objected concept-free nature of music made difficult to develop its own language of expression. Until the 16th century, the history of music had been the history of vocal music. The meaning of music was carried by text. Without word, music was considered to be incomplete. Thanks to the completion of tonal language just before 1700, music developed its own expressive language and obtained the aesthetic autonomy. Music is distinguished by its organization. Sound becomes tone when organized in a musical way. The tonal relationships are dynamic. Tones are heard not as a static entity but as a progressing event. Tones are only physical phenomena in the external world, but through the act of hearing they are comprehended as a unity with dynamic relations. Through the act of perceptual organization, successions of tones are comprehended in a musical context. The audial experience of music is directly connected to the phenomenal area of the act of conciousness. Husserl states that phenomenology seeks to present the essence of things in the same immediate manner as one hears a musical sound. He modelled his conception of phenomenological time on the protensive character of a musical melody, extending in sequence from past through present into the future, and leaving a retensive trail in memory. The organization of tonal systems has been developed in relation with the act of perception. Man's conceptual tendencies close to nature, chose a tonal series according to the law of natural harmonics. The tonal language has been thought to be organized from natural harmonics. Tones in obedience to the law of tonality are systematized by dynamic qualities. The law of tonality is of a purely dynamic nature and determines the dynamic meaning of the tonal world. Pure instrumental music is not determined by any ideas, contents, or purposes that are not musical. The idea of absolute music corresponds with the conception of pure instrumental music. With such idea of absolute music the meaning of a musical work has been thought to be fixed and immanent in the inner form. For the past 200 years, the idea of absolute music has been prevailed and the structural meaning without any context to external meaning has been considered as the only valuable meaning of music. In the beginning of the 20th century, A. Schőnberg destroyed the hierarchical system of tonality by treating all 12 tones in an octave as being equal. He replaced the dynamic tonal system with the mathmatically rationalized 12 tone system. According to Th. W. Adorno, the 12 tone system is an inevitable outcome of the historical pressure within the material and is related to current expressive needs. The changes which have taken place in music since World War Ⅱ, have been unusually radical. In the first place, the introduction of purely electronic sound synthesis have opened new areas to the composer. Secondly, the technique of serialism applied to rhythm, loudness, timbre and other paremeters. The total serialism has continued to have a determining influence on musical composition. Thirdly, John Cage introduced the use of chance. Chance operations resulted in the dissolution of the traditional musical form for the past 200 years. And there have been other revolutions of narrower scope. All these revolutions have caused the extraordinary diversity of music since 1960s. The term postmodernism has been applied to the music. Postmodernism has evolved through critiques of modernism, which refers to the conceptual order inaugurated by the Enlightenment. The pursuit of totality is basic to modernist thought. In contrast to it, postmodern attitudes defamiliarize and deconsturct the oppositions of the intrinsic and extrinsic, or the musical and the extramusical or subjective musical response and objective musical knowledge. Postmodernist claims that the true human subject is fragmentary, incoherent. A turn to postmodernism had a great effect on the ways we think about music, and made it necessary to rethink music from every possible perspective.

Musical Rhetorics , Mimesis , Musical Expression , Tonal Language , Inner Form