Read the following passage carefully.
In the late nineteenth century, musical formalism, championed most prominently by Eduard Hanslick, emerged as a robust counter-narrative to the prevailing Romantic ethos that equated musical value with emotional expressivity. Hanslick argued that the beauty of a musical composition is specifically musical—that is, it resides entirely in the tonal structures and forms themselves, not in any extra-musical feelings or programmatic narratives the music might evoke. For the formalist, a symphony is akin to an intricate sonic architecture; its merit is judged by the coherence and ingenuity of its thematic development, harmonic progression, and contrapuntal design.
However, Hanslick did not altogether deny that music could elicit emotional responses in listeners. Rather, he maintained that such responses are subjective, transient, and fundamentally separate from the objective aesthetic properties of the work. If a listener experiences profound melancholy upon hearing a minor-key adagio, Hanslick posited that this reaction is an incidental byproduct of the listener’s psychological state and associative memories, rather than an intrinsic property encoded into the music by the composer. Consequently, to evaluate a piece of music based on its capacity to move the listener is, in Hanslick’s view, to commit a category error, confusing the psychological effect of the art with its structural essence.
Expressionists, on the other hand, argued that the structural elements of music are merely vehicles for the transmission of emotional states. They contended that a formalist approach strips music of its profound human resonance, reducing it to a sterile academic exercise. Yet, modern critics note that Hanslick's rigid demarcation between form and feeling paved the way for twentieth-century structuralism, demonstrating that an obsessive focus on form, while seemingly austere, provided a necessary corrective to the unchecked emotional excesses of late-Romantic criticism.
Evaluate the following statement based on the passage:
According to Hanslick's framework, two listeners could have entirely different emotional reactions to the exact same musical composition without either listener misunderstanding the composition's objective aesthetic properties.
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