2010, Vol.18, No.1

Journal of the Korean Society for Musicology 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.64

eISSN : 3092-2410
https://journal.kci.go.kr/musicology

This paper is an attempt to reconsider Western music history with the concept of space. In this regard, the Seventeenth century was a watershed. It distinguishes two different phases in music history: ancient and modern. In ancient period, the concept of music was not defined to purely sonic phenomena. It rather was a cosmological principle. In Modern period, as the concept of ‘subject’ emerged, the music became an instrument for projecting subjectivity. In the Twentieth century, this modern concept of music began to change. The newly coined word, ‘soundscape’ shows the change. This concept implies the fact that we are already ‘in’ culturally and geographically defined music even before we project ourselves through the sound.

As the expression of the direct affinity between civilization and nature, and as a place of enjoyment suited to meditation or repose, the garden thus acquires the cosmic significance of an idealised image of the world, a “paradise” in the etymological sense of the term, and yet a testimony to a culture, a style, an age, and often to the originality of a creative artist (ICOMOS, 1982). Landscape garden of the eighteenth-century England was a cultural phenomenon that all at that time social elements were cohered. Landscape garden of the eighteenth-century England was the visible space that one experienced a main character of a story in various landscape at the same time that visitors were spectators. Music of the eighteenth-century England was an acoustic space to be able to feel various times and places that could not look. According to this, I explained that music is a landscape not to see but to listen. So the new visual way that can describe eighteenth-century British music is provided. Therefore, I considered the music of the early eighteenth-century England as iconographical music and the music of the mid eighteenth-century England as naturalistic music.

The meaning of ‘space’ in music has been discovered as the performances of religious function in spreading God’s words with the construction of God’s building, the cases of effect in musical composition and form from experiments and environments with the sound condition in building, the works of portraying nonmusical space and phenomenon as the sound, and relationships between space and music within music history about expression of symbolic space in the world of reality and non-reality. There are reasons that idea for previous ‘space’ in Twentieth century could not coexist with the concept of flowing ‘time’ as ‘cause and effect’ in absolute dimension. The main reason is the formation of concept of ‘time-space’. The application of this concept which came from the ‘theory of relativity’ shows in various structure of posthistorical and postmodern dimension with breaking from the concept for modern space and time in the general art and the music as well as the science. This topic theme suggests the concrete examples for that how the meaning of ‘space’ realizes in pieces of music since Twentieth century.