The concept of organicism is wily and potentially problematic – it has a history of being a useful aesthetic descriptor, but it can also be attached to a variety of oppressive ideologies. The most salient discussions for my thinking have surrounded organicism in music.
Heinrich Schenker devised influential theories for describing and analyzing works of Western classical music from the "common practice period." This time period is from roughly 1650 to 1900.
These theories were developed from a set of philosophical preconceptions about aesthetics, acoustics, the perception of music, and even national and ethnic identities (yikes!). For these and many other reasons, it is important that Schenker's ideas are only taught in a contextualized manner and that their limited scope is fully explained. Schenkerian theory is helpful for describing one very limited variety of music and fails to help with analysis of a wide variety of other musics.
While a variety of other theories have been developed since the widespread emergence of interest in Schenker, the concept of organicism has still been persistent in the courses and composition lessons that I took during my undergrad and graduate studies.
I rely on concepts of organicism for my compositional work and continue to find the use of constraint techniques to produce a varied organicism to be compelling. However, it's worth noting that a variety of contemporary musical aesthetics thrive precisely by fostering disunity and by eschewing the value placed on organic forms and materials.
Further reading: take a look at the entry on organicism on the SchenkerGUIDE website.
Last modified on 03-04-2022.