A consideration of the relations between the harmonic and compositional treatises of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the concurrent rise of the aesthetic autonomy shows that an increasing resistance to considering `extra-musical’ functions to be a property of the autonomous musical work resembles a contemporaneous resistance to `extra-musical’ theoretical explanations, in this case explanations for the generation of chords which depended upon string divisions, resonating bodies, and other natural phenomena. Both traditions shift from a `naturecentered’ to an `ego-centered’ basis.

Firstly, the article examines the idea of aesthetic autonomy which arose towards the end of the eighteenth century and suggests some of the ways that contemporaneous theorizing about music was affected by this aesthetic. Instead of functioning as a musical `type’, the autonomous musical work functioned as a self-governing whole imbued with metaphysical significance. Analysis, as a discipline, arose at this historical juncture. Secondly, the article tracks the changing role playedby the observation of natural phenomena in theories of chord generation. The origin of chords and tones were now considered less as acoustical phenomena and more as metaphysical entities. Finally, the article considers the resurgence of interest in acoustics in the late nineteenth century in light of the above shift. This interest was not an independent development, unaffected by the aesthetics of autonomy, but was implicated in these aesthetics in a complex way. The history of relations between science and art involves less a rift than a deep regularity between the two fields.